Finite state methods have been in common use in various areas of natural language processing (NLP) for many years. A series of specialized workshops in this area illustrates this. In 1996, András Kornai organized a very successful workshop entitled Extended Finite State Models of Language. One of the results of that workshop was a special issue of Natural Language Engineering (Volume 2, Number 4). In 1998, Kemal Oflazer organized a workshop called Finite State Methods in Natural Language Processing. A selection of submissions for this workshop were later included in a special issue of Computational Linguistics (Volume 26, Number 1). Inspired by these events, Lauri Karttunen, Kimmo Koskenniemi and Gertjan van Noord took the initiative for a workshop on finite state methods in NLP in Helsinki, as part of the European Summer School in Language, Logic and Information. As a related special event, the 20th anniversary of two-level morphology was celebrated. The appreciation of these events led us to believe that once again it should be possible, with some additional submissions, to compose an interesting special issue of this journal.