The Graphical Models Toolkit (GMTK)

Jeff Bilmes <bilmes AT ee DOT washington DOT edu>University of Washington, Dept. of EE

SSLI Laboratory, University of Washington, Dept. of Electrical Engineering
 

This is the site for GMTK, the Graphical Modeling Toolkit.

The Graphical Models Toolkit (GMTK) is an open source, publically available toolkit for developing graphical-model and dynamic Bayesian network (DBN) based speech recognition and general time series systems. Graphical models and DBNs in particular are a flexible, concise, and expressive probabilistic modeling framework with which one may rapidly specify a vast collection of statistical models. GMTK has a number of features, including a language for specifying structures and probability distributions, logarithmic space exact training and decoding procedures, the concept of switching parents, and a generalized EM training method which allows arbitrary sub-Gaussian parameter tying. Taken together, these features endow GMTK with a degree of expressiveness and functionality that significantly complements other publically available packages. GMTK was recently used in the 2001 Johns Hopkins Summer Workshop.

At this time the source code is unfortuantely not (yet) available, but binaries are available for the Linux, Solaris, and Cygwin architectures. The cygwin binaries were tested only with the Cygwin DLL 1.3.12 release. Work is underway to make the toolkit available in full open source form.

A draft of the documentation (over 100 pages and written by Jeff Bilmes) in .pdf format is available as well as a tutorial, which consists of a simple run through experiment for the Aurora 2.0 corpus. Note that for the tutorial to run under Linux, you will need to change some of the scripts to use the Endian swapping (i.e., you might need to proivde the programs with an "-iswp1 T" or an "-iswp1 F" option, depending on what Endian architecture you are running on, see the documentation for what the "-iswp" options do).

There is some updated GMTK documentation at the SSLI wikki. Note that the documentation above, while still mostly valid, does not list many of the new features that have been added as of April 2008, and the wikki is a helpful addition.

Here are the linux, solaris, and cygwin binaries are available. Note that only the linux binaries have recently been compiled (latest, May 2007).

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. IIS-0093430. Any opionions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.