Some Reasons
Disillusionment
- Writing wide-coverage, high-level grammars turned out to be very difficult to create.
- With easy access to text in electronic form the lack of robustness and poor coverage became frustrating.
Success of finite-state morphology
- Formalisms for describing phonological alternations turned out to be finite-state models.
- Word-internal syntax (morphotactics) is finite-state.
Success of “chunking”
- Although English as a whole is not a finite-state language, there are subsets of English for which a finite-state description is not only adequate but easier to construct than a PSG.
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*slide courtesy of L. Karttunen