A warning!
Not all useful functions are finite state
- sentence --> grammaticality judgment (CFG)
- sentence --> parse
- the mouse that the cat chased ran --> [[[the mouse] [that [[the cat] [chased e]]]] [ran]]
- English sentence --> French sentence
But finite-state methods still useful here:
- Heavy preprocessing: clean up all the finite-state stuff & leave a smaller simpler problem for stronger algorithms
- Can approximate the real functions - get likely candidates