>Ignorance has been defeated though. FSM means finite state machine, the most
>simple computing device or automaton. A full description may be found in
>Gazdar & Mellish, Natural Language Processing in PROLOG/LISP/PoPLog.
I've always heard these referred to as "finite state automata" or FSAs, also
known as Turing machines, since it was the British mathemtician Alan Turing who
first defined the notion. When I looked upo "finite state" in the British
National Corpus, I found 19 occurrences, in 5 different texts, all of which
except two occurred in the phrase "finite state grammar" (the other two being
"finite state machine"). A search using the web metacrawler got me 49
occurrences of the phrase "finite state" on web pages around the globe, which
broke down as follows:
14: finite state machine
8: finite state automaton/a
2: finite state grammar
9: finite state [other]
FSM and FSA seem to be used synonymously. Indeed, I found one citation which
made their synonymy explicit.
My unsurprising conclusions: (1) "finite state automaton" is on the way out as
a collocation, except in the further reaches of computer science; (2) the
usage populations sampled by the BNC and the world wide web overlap but are not
identical
Lou Burnard