Since NPYLM is a semi-Markov model as described in Section 2, a naïve approach would be to combine it with a semi-Markov CRF (Sarawagi and Cohen, 2005) as the discriminative model.
this strategy does not work well for two reasons: First, since a semi-Markov CRF is a model for transitions between segments, it cannot deal with character-level transitions and thus performs suboptimally on its own.