Research Questions in Finite-state Language Processing

In order to experiment with finite-state techniques, it is very important to have available an implementation of the Finite-state Calculus, i.e., implementations of all the important finite-state operations such as union, concatenation, Kleene closure, difference, intersection, complementation, etc. An operation such as union takes two finite-state languages l1 and l2 (expressed as regular expressions or as finite-state automata) and produces the union of the sentences in these languages. Such regular operations are crucial building blocks of approximation algorithms and other finite-state language processing algorithms.