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A language-independent method of finite-state 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.
Kimmo Koskenniemi (Mon,) studied this question.