More Reasons
Rise of probabilistic thinking
- Many probabilistic methods can be described with weighted finite-state machines. Such descriptions are clean, comprehensible, and efficiently manipulated/optimized/combined.
Progress in finite-state technology
- Special finite-state formalisms suitable for the description of linguistic phenomena.
- Compilers that make it possible to efficiently construct efficient machines from such descriptions.
- New algorithms for the weighted and transducer cases.
*slide courtesy of L. Karttunen (modified)