- L. Karttunen, Kemal Oflazer. 1998. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Finite State Methods in Natural Language Processing. Abstract: Recent years has seen a substantial increase in the use of finite state techniques in many aspects of natural language processing as mature tools for building large scale finite-state systems from various research laboratories and universities become available. This trend was by no means foreseen as late as ten years ago given the well-known demonstration by Noam Chomsky in 1957 that finite-state methods are inherently incapable of representing the full richness of constructions in a natural language. Nevertheless, it is evident now that there are many subsets of natural language that are adequately covered by finite-state means and that there are many other areas where finite-state approximations of more powerful formalisms are of great practical benefit. The discovery that systems of phonological rewrite rules and optimality constraints are within the finite-state domain has made an important theoretical leap forward. We expect that similar discoveries are yet to be made in other areas of linguistics. 
