ReFr: An Open-Source Reranker Framework

ReFr (http://refr.googlecode.com) is a software architecture for specifying, training and using reranking models, which take the n-best output of some existing system and produce new scores for each of then hypotheses that potentially induce a different ranking, ideally yielding better results than the original system. The Reranker Framework has some special support for building discriminative language models, but can be applied to any reranking problem. The framework is designed with parallelism and scalability in mind, being able to run on any Hadoop cluster out of the box. While extremely efficient, ReFr is also quite flexible, allowing researchers to explore a wide variety of features and learning methods. ReFr has been used for building state-of-the-art discriminative LM's for both speech recognition and machine translation systems.