In spite of the wide availability of more powerful (context free, mildly context sensitive, and even Turing-equivalent) formalisms, the bulk of the applied work on language and sublanguage modeling, especially for the purposes of recognition and topic search, is still performed by various finite state methods. In fact, the use of such methods in research labs as well as in applied work actually increased in the past five years. To bring together those developing and using extended finite state methods to text analysis, speech/OCR language modeling, and related CL and NLP tasks with those in AI and CS interested in analyzing and possibly extending the domain of finite state algorithms, a workshop was held in August 1996 in Budapest as part of the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI'96).