This is a collection of new papers by leading researchers on natural language parsing. In the past, the problem of how people parse the sentences they hear - determine the identity of the words in these sentences and group these words into larger units - has been addressed in very different ways by experimental psychologists, by theoretical linguists, and by researchers in artificial intelligence, with little apparent relationship among the solutions proposed by each group. However, because of important advances in all these disciplines, research on parsing in each of these fields now seems to have something significant to contribute to the others, as this volume demonstrates. The volume includes some papers applying the results of experimental psychological studies of parsing to linguistic theory, others which present computational models of parsing, and a mathematical linguistics paper on tree-adjoining grammars and parsing.

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 in September 2005.

The 24 revised full papers and 7 revised poster papers presented together with 2 invited contributions and the abstracts of 6 software demos were selected from 50 submissions and have gone through two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers address various topics in morphology, optimality theory, some special FSM families, weighted FSM algorithms, FSM representations, exploration, ordered structures, and surface parsing.

The finite-state paradigm of computer science has provided a basis for natural-language applications that are efficient, elegant, and robust. This volume is a practical guide to finite-state theory and the affiliated programming languages lexc and xfst. Readers will learn how to write tokenizers, spelling checkers, and especially morphological analyzer/generators for words in English, French, Finnish, Hungarian, and other languages.
Included are graded introductions, examples, and exercises suitable for individual study as well as formal courses. These take advantage of widely-tested lexc and xfst applications that are just becoming available for noncommercial use via the Internet.