... number of backoff transitions. The order of state sjis either k (if k is the highest order in the model) or k + 1 (by extending the history of statesiby one word). If it is of order k, then ... 0for backoff arcs, the shortest path will traverse the fewest possible backoff arcs; further, since higher-order backoff arcs cost less in the first dimension of the T, T weights in M, the shortest ... transition, which re-flects the semantics of the “otherwise” formulation of smoothing (Allauzen et al., 2003). For example, the typical backoff formulation of the probability of a word w given a history...