This volume of Lecture Notes in Arti?cial Intelligence is a collection of revised versions of the papers and lectures presented at the 8th International Workshop on Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing, FSMNLP 2009. The workshop was held at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, during July 21 24, 2009. This was the ?rst time in the history of the FSMNLP series that the event was not located in Europe. As its predecessors, the scope of FSMNLP 2009 included a range of t- ics around computational morphology, natural language processing, ?nite-state methods, automata, and...