In many applications, it is necessary to determine the similarity of two strings. A widely-used notion of string similarity is the edit distance: the minimum number of insertions, deletions, and substitutions required to transform one string into the other. In this report, we provide a stochastic model for string edit distance. Our stochastic model allows us to learn a string edit distance function from a corpus of examples. We illustrate the utility of our approach by applying it to the difficult problem of learning the pronunciation of words in conversational speech. In this application, we learn a string edit distance with nearly one fifth the error rate of the untrained Levenshtein distance. Our approach is applicable to any string classification problem that may be solved using a similarity function against a database of labeled prototypes.

This paper presents an overview of the Cedar programming environment, focusing on its overall structure-that is, the major components of Cedar and the way they are organized. Cedar supports the development of programs written in a single programming language, also called Cedar. Its primary purpose is to increase the productivity of programmers whose activities include experimental pro-gramming and the development of prototype software systems for a high-performance personal computer. The paper emphasizes the extent to which the Cedar language, with run-time support, has influenced the organization, flexibility, usefulness, and stability of the Cedar environment. It high-lights the novel system features of Cedar, including automatic storage management of dynamically allocated typed values, a run-time type system that provides run-time access to Cedar data type definitions and allows interpretive manipulation of typed values, and a powerful deuice-independent imaging model that supports the user interface facilities. Using these discussions to set the context, the paper addresses the language and system features and the methodologies used to facilitate the integration of Cedar applications. A comparison of Cedar with other programming environments further identifies areas where Cedar excels and areas where work remains to be done.

The Table Maker's Dilemma is the problem of always getting correctly rounded results when computing the elementary functions. After a brief presentation of this problem, we present new developments that have helped us to solve this problem for the double-precision exponential function in a small domain. These new results show that this problem can be solved, at least for the double-precision format, for the most usual functions. Index Terms---Floating-point arithmetic, rounding, elementary functions, Table Maker's Dilemma. ------------------------------ ###p### ------------------------------ 1INTRODUCTION HE IEEE-754 standard for floating-point arithmetic [2], [11] requires that the results of the arithmetic operations should always be correctly rounded. That is, once a rounding mode is chosen among the four possible ones, the system must behave as if the result were first computed exactly, with infinite precision, then rounded. There is no similar requirement for the elementary...

A significant portion of the ANSI/IEEE-854 Standard for Radix-Independent Floating-Point Arithmetic is defined in PVS (Prototype Verification System). Since IEEE-854 is a generalization of the ANSI/IEEE-754 Standard for Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic, the definition of IEEE-854 in PVS also formally defines much of IEEE-754. This collection of PVS theories provides a basis for machine checked verification of floating-point systems. This formal definition illustrates that formal specification techniques are sufficiently advanced that it is reasonable to consider their use in the development of future standards. keywords: Floating-point arithmetic, Formal Methods, Specification, Verification. 1 Introduction This document describes a definition of the ANSI/IEEE-854 [3] Standard for Radix-Independent Floating-Point Arithmetic in the PVS verification system (developed at SRI International) [4]. IEEE-854 is a generalization of the ANSI/IEEE-754 [2] Standard for Binary Floating-Point Ari...

Abstract. Poly1305-AES is a state-of-the-art message-authentication code suitable for a wide variety of applications. Poly1305-AES computes a 16-byte authenticator of a variable-length message, using a 16-byte AES key, a 16-byte additional key, and a 16-byte nonce. The security of Poly1305-AES is very close to the security of AES; the security gap is at most 14D⌈L/16⌉/2 106 if messages have at most L bytes, the attacker sees at most 2 64 authenticated messages, and the attacker attempts D forgeries. Poly1305-AES can be computed at extremely high speed: for example, fewer than 3.625(ℓ + 170) Athlon cycles for an ℓ-byte message. This speed is achieved without precomputation; consequently, 1000 keys can be handled simultaneously without cache misses. Special-purpose hardware can compute Poly1305-AES at even higher speed. Poly1305-AES is parallelizable, incremental, and not subject to any intellectualproperty claims.

Numerical software is central to our computerized society; it is used... to analyze future options for financial markets and the economy. It is essential that it be of high

Abstract—Large scale scientific simulation codes typically run on a cluster of CPUs that write/read time steps to/from a single file system. As data sets are constantly growing in size, this increasingly leads to I/O bottlenecks. When the rate at which data is produced exceeds the available I/O bandwidth, the simulation stalls and the CPUs are idle. Data compression can alleviate this problem by using some CPU cycles to reduce the amount of data needed to be transfered. Most compression schemes, however, are designed to operate offline and seek to maximize compression, not throughput. Furthermore, they often require quantizing floating-point values onto a uniform integer grid, which disqualifies their use in applications where exact values must be retained. We propose a simple scheme for lossless, online compression of floating-point data that transparently integrates into the I/O of many applications. A plug-in scheme for data-dependent prediction makes our scheme applicable to a wide variety of data used in visualization, such as unstructured meshes, point sets, images, and voxel grids. We achieve state-of-the-art compression rates and speeds, the latter in part due to an improved entropy coder. We demonstrate that this significantly accelerates I/O throughput in real simulation runs. Unlike previous schemes, our method also adapts well to variable-precision floating-point and integer data. Index Terms—High throughput, lossless compression, file compaction for I/O efficiency, fast entropy coding, range coder, predictive coding, large scale simulation and visualization. 1

Neural network simulations often spend a large proportion of their time computing exponential functions. Since the exponentiation routines of typical math libraries are rather slow, their replacement with a fast approximation can greatly reduce the overall computation time. This paper describes how exponentiation can be approximated by manipulating the components of a standard (IEEE-754) floating-point representation. This models the exponential function as well as a lookup table with linear interpolation, but is significantly faster and more compact.

Current critical systems often use a lot of floating-point computations, and thus the testing or static analysis of programs containing floatingpoint operators has become a priority. However, correctly defining the semantics of common implementations of floating-point is tricky, because semantics may change according to many factors beyond source-code level, such as choices made by compilers. We here give concrete examples of problems that can appear and solutions for implementing in analysis software. 1

The IEEE-854 Standard for radix-independent floating-point arithmetic has been partially defined within two mechanical verification systems. We present the specification of key parts of the standard in both HOL and PVS. This effort to formalize IEEE-854 has given the opportunity to compare the styles imposed by the two verification systems on the specification.