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This Section discusses what finite state automata are, what they can do, and their limitations.
Finite state automata are used a lot for all kinds of things in computational linguistics. For example, they are used in morphology, phonology, text to speech, data mining ... Why are they so popular? Well, they are very simple (as you will see for yourself, soon) and extremely well understood mathematically. Furthermore, they are easy to implement (this, you will also see soon) and usually these implementations are very efficient. Therefore, finite state solutions tend to be good solutions. However, something so simple and efficient has to be restricted in what it is able to do in some way, which means that there isn't a finite state solution for every problem. We will look at some limitations of finite state methods later in this chapter. But first, let's see what finite state automata are and what they can do.
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