We study automata for capturing transformations employed by practical natural language processing systems, such as those that translate between human languages. For several variations of finite-state string and tree transducers, we ask formal questions about expressiveness, modularity, teachability, and generalization.

We describe experimental work on cryptographic protection of databases and software. The database in our experiment is a natural language dictionary of over 4000 Spanish verbs. Our tentative conclusion is that the overhead cost of computing with encrypted data is fairly small. 1 Introduction It is often desirable to allow a user to access a database D via some program P while preventing her from obtaining a copy of the entire contents of the database. For example, let D be a table of pairs (l i ; r i ), 1 i n, where each l i is the name of a person and P (l i ; D) = r i is the phone number of l i . A typical user of D should be able to obtain the number r i if she knows l i but should not be able to obtain the names and numbers of the people she does not know. More formally, given a database D and program P that accesses it, we wish to construct an encrypted database D 0 and a corresponding program P 0 with the following properties. ffl For any query q, P (q; D) = P 0 (q; D ...

We show how a construction on matrix representations of two tape automata proposed by Schutzenberger to prove that rational function are unambiguous can be given a central role in the theory of relations and functions realized by finite automata, in such a way that the other basic results such as the "Cross-Section Theorem", its dual the theorem of rational uniformisation, or the decomposition theorem of rational functions into sequential functions, appear as direct and formal consequences of it.

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Abstract. This paper presents some features of the Vaucanson platform. We describe some original algorithms on weighted automata and transducers (computation of the quotient, conversion of a regular expression into a weighted automaton, and composition). We explain how complex declarations due to the generic programming are masked from the user and finally we present a proposal for an XML format that allows implicit descriptions for simple types of automata. 1

Contents 1Preface 5 2 Finite recognizers of languages 6 3 Some early proposals 19 4 Using non-deterministic machines 34 5 One level phonology 41 6 Optimality theory: first ideas 62 7 OTP: Primitive optimality theory 76 Lenient compositions: the proper treatment of OT? 86 9 Acquisition models 91 10 Exercises and speculations 113 1 Stabler - Lx 236 1999 A web page of readin gs: 236: some readings the beauty of finite state machines and related topics Yu 1997 Regular languages. In Rozenberg & Salomaa, eds. Handbook of Formal Languages, Volume 1. Perrin 1990 Finite automata. In J. Van Leuwen, Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science, Volume B. Salomaa 1973 Formal Languages. Sec 5 Hopcroft and Ullman 1979 Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Comp

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This article is a perspective on some important developments in semantics and in computational linguistics over the past forty years. It reviews two lines of research that lie at the opposite ends on the field: semantics and morphology. The semantic part deals with issues from the 1970s such as discourse referents, implicative verbs, presuppositions, and questions. The second part presents a brief history of the application of finite-state transducers to linguistic analysis starting with the advent of two-level morphology in the early 1980s and culminating in successful commercial applications in the 1990s. It offers some commentary on the relationship, or the lack thereof, between computational and paper-and-pencil linguistics. The final section returns to the semantic issues and their application to currently popular tasks such as textual inference and question answering. 1. Prologue Thirty-eight years ago, in the summer of 1969 at the second meeting of COLING in Sånga-Säby in Sweden, I stood for the first time in front of a computational audience and started my talk on Discourse Referents by reading the following passage (Karttunen 1969a, 1976):