Historical Context
In Syntactic Structures 1957, Chomsky showed that natural languages cannot be described by “finite-state Markov processes”.
If … either … or … then … OK
If … either … then … or2 … not OK
Most of the attention of computational linguists in the past decades has been directed towards more powerful formalisms.
In the past decade there has been revival of interest in finite-state methods. Why?
slide courtesy of L. Karttunen