Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing

These proceedings contain the final versions of the papers presented at the 7th InternationalWorkshop on Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing, FSMNLP 2008. The workshop was held in Ispra, Italy, on September 11¿12, 2008. The event was the seventh instance in the series of FSMNLP workshops, and the third that was arranged as a stand-alone event. In 2008 FSMNLP was merged with the FASTAR workshop. The aim of the FSMNLP workshops is to bring together members of the research and industrial community working on finite-state based models in language technology, computational linguistics, web mining, linguistics, and cognitive science on one hand, and, on related theory and methods in fields such as computer science and mathematics, on the other. Thus, the workshop series is a forum for researchers and practicioners working on applications as well as theoretical and implementation aspects. The special theme of FSMNLP 2008 centered around high performance finite-state devices in large-scale natural language text processing systems and applications. In the context of FSMNLP 2008, we received in total 37 submisions, of which 13 were selected as regular papers, 6 as short papers and 1 as demo paper. The acceptance rate for regular papers was 46,4%. Most of the papers were evaluated by at least four Programme Committee members, with the help of external reviewers. Only 15% of the papers were reviewed by three reviewers. In addition to the submitted papers, four lectures were given by invited speakers. The invited speakers and the authors of the papers represented (at least) Croatia, Finland, France, Gemany, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Sweden, U.K., and the USA.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen