CALL FOR PAPERS SPECIAL ISSUE of NATURAL LANGUAGE ENGINEERING Finite State Methods in Natural Language Processing GUEST EDITORS Lauri Karttunen, Xerox PARC and RXRC Kimmo Koskenniemi, University of Helsinki Gertjan van Noord, University of Groningen Finite state methods are used in various areas of linguistic computation, including tokenization, lexicography, spell checking, part of speech tagging, speech recognition, grapheme to phoneme conversion, computational phonology and morphology, as well as computational syntax. In recent years the use of finite state methods has increased both in practical applications (such as in morphological analyzers for a variety of languages), as well as in more theoretical approaches (such as in recent attempts to formalize optimality-theoretic analyses in phonology by finite-state means). A series of workshops have been organised in the past around this theme (Budapest 1996, Ankara 1998, Helsinki 2001). The Budapest workshop led to an earlier, similar, special issue of NLE (NLE 2(4), 1996), edited by Andras Kornai. The current initiative originated at the workshop `Finite State Methods in NLP', and a related event entitled `Twenty Years of Two-level Morphology'. Both events were organised in connection with ESSLLI, Helsinki, august 2001. http://www.helsinki.fi/esslli/ Contributors of these events are encouraged to submit full articles based on their abstracts. In addition, we welcome contributions from other researchers. SCHEDULE Call for papers issued: 1 December 2001 Papers due: 1 April 2002 Notification to authors: 1 June 2002 Final versions due: 1 November 2002 Publication: 1 March 2003 SUBMISSION PROCEDURE Initial submissions should be sent electronically in PDF format to Gertjan van Noord vannoord@let.rug.nl Formatting instructions for final submissions are available from the journal's homepage, which is available via http://us.cambridge.org/