This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Finite-State Methods in Natural Language Processing, FSMNLP 2005, held in Helsinki, Finland, September 2005. The book presents 24 revised full papers and seven revised poster papers together with two invited contributions and abstracts of six software demos. Topics include morphology, optimality theory, some special FSM families, weighted FSM algorithms, FSM representations, exploration, ordered structures, and surface parsing.

These proceedings contain the final versions of the papers presented at the 7th International Workshop on Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing (FSMNLP), held in Ispra, Italy, on September 11–12, 2008. The aim of the FSMNLP workshops is to bring together members of the research and industrial community working on finite-state based models in language technology, computational linguistics, web mining, linguistics and cognitive science on one hand, and on related theory and methods in fields such as computer science and mathematics on the other. Thus, the workshop series is a forum for researchers and practitioners working on applications as well as theoretical and implementation aspects. The special theme of FSMNLP 2008 was high performance finite-state devices in large-scale natural language text processing systems and applications. The papers in this publication cover a range of interesting NLP applications, including machine learning and translation, logic, computational phonology, morphology and semantics, data mining, information extraction and disambiguation, as well as programming, optimization and compression of finite-state networks. The applied methods include weighted algorithms, kernels and tree automata. In addition, relevant aspects of software engineering, standardization and European funding programmes are discussed.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on the Finite-State-Methods and Natural Language Processing, FSMNLP 2009. The workshop was held at the University of Pretoria, South Africa on July 2009. In total 21 papers were submitted and of those papers 13 were accepted as regular papers and a further 6 as extended abstracts. The papers are devoted to computational morphology, natural language processing, finite-state methods, automata, and related formal language theory.

Weighted finite-state transducers (WFSTs) are commonly used by engineers and computational linguists for processing and generating speech and text. This book first provides a detailed introduction to this formalism. It then introduces Pynini, a Python library for compiling finite-state grammars and for combining, optimizing, applying, and searching finite-state transducers. This book illustrates this library's conventions and use with a series of case studies. These include the compilation and application of context-dependent rewrite rules, the construction of morphological analyzers and generators, and text generation and processing applications.

Contains papers that cover a range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications, including machine learning and translation, logic, computational phonology, morphology and semantics, data mining, information extraction and disambiguation, as well as programming, optimization and compression of finite-state networks.