Dynamic Programming (DP) is an important class of algorithms widely used in many areas of speech and language processing. Recently there have been a series of work trying to formalize many instances of DP algorithms under algebraic and graph-theoretic frameworks. This tutorial surveys two such frameworks, namely semirings and directed hypergraphs, and draws connections between them. We formalize two particular types of DP algorithms under each of these frameworks: the Viterbi-style topological algorithms and the Dijkstra-style best-first algorithms. Wherever relevant, we also discuss typical applications of these algorithms in Natural Language Processing.

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