A language independent model for recognition and production of word forms is presented. This "two-level model" is based on a new way of describing morphological alternations. All rules describing the morphophonological variations are parallel and relatively independent of each other. Individual rules are implemented as finite state automata, as in an earlier model due to Martin Kay and Ron Kaplan. The two-level model has been implemented as an operational computer programs in several places. A number of operational two-level descriptions have been written or are in progress (Finnish, English, Japanese, Rumanian, French, Swedish, Old Church Slavonic, Greek, Lappish, Arabic, Icelandic). The model is bidirectional and it is capable of both analyzing and synthesizing word-forms.

A language independent model for recognition and production of word forms is presented. This "two-level model" is based on a new way of describing morphological alternations. All rules describing the morphophonological variations are parallel and relatively independent of each other. Individual rules are implemented as finite state automata, as in an earlier model due to Martin Kay and Ron Kaplan. The two-level model has been implemented as an operational computer programs in several places. A number of operational two-level descriptions have been written or are in progress (Finnish, English, Japanese, Rumanian, French, Swedish, Old Church Slavonic, Greek, Lappish, Arabic, Icelandic). The model is bidirectional and it is capable of both analyzing and synthesizing word-forms.

A language-independent method of finitestate surface syntactic parsing and word-disambiguation is discussed. Input sentences are represented as finite-state networks already containing all possible roles and interpretations of its units. Also syntactic constraint rules are represented as finite-state machines where each constraint excludes certain types of ungrammatical readings. The whole grammar is an intersection of its constraint rules and excludes all ungrammatical possibilities leaving the correct interpretation(s) of the sentence. The method is being tested for Finnish, Swedish and English.

A~st~ac.t: Thi~ paper discusses the problems of descrip-tio~ a~d c,m~putatlonal implementation of phonology and ~no~'pholo[~y in Semitic languages, using Ancient Akkadian as m~ example. Phonological and morphophono~ logical va~ iations are described using standard finite-state two..level morphological rules. Interdigitation, prefixation ax~.d s~tffixation are described by t~sing an intersection of ~w~ lexicons which effectively defines lexical representations of wo~'ds, ~o lntrod'trcticm Word-.fir:mat]on in Semitic languges poses several challengeu to computational morphology. One obvious difficulty is its nonconcatenative nature ie. the fact that inflection :is not just adding prefixes and suffixes, but also i~tcludes interdigitation where the phonological sequence 3ymbolizh~g a verbal root is interrupted by individual and short sequences of phonemes denoting various derivational and inflectional stems. ]fn addition to this, there are ~xumerou~ phonological and raorphophonological processes of a more conventional character.Two-level phonology assumes a framework for wordformation ~vhere there is an underlying lexical representation of the word-form and a surface representation which are related to each other with two=level rules [Kosken-nien~ J983]. These rules compare the representations directly a~ld they operate in parallel The lexicon comporxent deth.~.es what lexical representations are permissible and how they correspond to sequences of morphemes, see figure 1.MORPHEMES

A language-independent framework for syntactic finlte-state parsing is discussed. The article presents a framework, a formalism, a compiler and a parser for grammars written in this forrealism. As a substantial example, fragments from a nontrivial finite-state grammar of English are discussed. The linguistic framework of the present approach is based on a surface syntactic tagging scheme by F. Karlsson. This representation is slightly less powerful than phrase structure tree notation, letUng some ambiguous constructions be described more concisely. The finite-state rule compiler implements what was briefly sketched by Koskenniemi (1990). It is based on the calculus of finite-state machines. The compiler transforms rules into rule-automata. The run-time parser exploits one of certain alternative strategies in performing the effective intersection of the rule automata and the sentence automaton. Fragments of a fairly comprehensive finite-state granmmr of English axe presented here, including samples from non-finite constructions as a demonstration of the capacity of the present formalism, which goes far beyond plain disamblguation or part of speech tagging. The grammar itself is directly related to a parser and tagging system for English created as a part of project SIMPR I using Karlsson's CG (Constraint Grammar) formalism.