First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. Overview: This paper looks at the difficult problem of learning FST models of unaligned input and output sequences. This is an interesting problem and the approach appears to have merit; the main drawback of the paper is that some sections are very difficult to understand. In the abstract and introduction: the authors mention that the setting where sequences are not aligned is more realistic. I believe the authors, but examples of problems where unaligned sequences are the norm would be welcome.

Finite-State Transducers (FST) are a standard tool for modeling paired input-output sequences and are used in numerous applications, ranging from computational biology to natural language processing. Recently Balle et al. presented a spectral algorithm for learning FST from samples of aligned input-output sequences. In this paper we address the more realistic, yet challenging setting where the alignments are unknown to the learning algorithm. We frame FST learning as finding a low rank Hankel matrix satisfying constraints derived from observable statistics. Under this formulation, we provide identifiability results for FST distributions. Then, following previous work on rank minimization, we propose a regularized convex relaxation of this objective which is based on minimizing a nuclear norm penalty subject to linear constraints and can be solved efficiently.

Morphological analyzers are the essential milestones for many linguistic applications like; machine translation, word sense disambiguation, spells checkers, and search engines etc. Therefore, development of an effective morphological analyzer has a greater impact on the computational recognition of a language. In this paper, we present a finite state transducer based inflectional morphological analyzer for a resource poor language of India, known as Maithili. Maithili is an eastern Indo-Aryan language spoken in the eastern and northern regions of Bihar in India and the southeastern plains, known as tarai of Nepal. This work can be recognized as the first work towards the computational development of Maithili which may attract researchers around the country to up-rise the language to establish in computational world.

Finite-State Transducers (FST) are a standard tool for modeling paired input-output sequences and are used in numerous applications, ranging from computational biology to natural language processing. Recently Balle et al. presented a spectral algorithm for learning FST from samples of aligned input-output sequences. In this paper we address the more realistic, yet challenging setting where the alignments are unknown to the learning algorithm. We frame FST learning as finding a low rank Hankel matrix satisfying constraints derived from observable statistics. Under this formulation, we provide identifiability results for FST distributions.