The IBM Attila speech recognition toolkit

We describe the design of IBM's Attila speech recognition toolkit. We show how the combination of a highly modular and efficient library of low-level C++ classes with simple interfaces, an interconnection layer implemented in a modern scripting language (Python), and a standardized collection of scripts for system-building produce a flexible and scalable toolkit that is useful both for basic research and for construction of large transcription systems for competitive evaluations.