 “a” could be the one required by the pattern, or one of the outer “a”s could be. The parsing algorithm would return all these possibilities as distinct paths through the automaton.</p>
<p>Handling ambiguity is particularly important in linguistic applications, where different parses may correspond to different linguistic analyses.</p>
</section>
</section>
<section id="applications-in-phonology" class="level2">
<h2 class="anchored" data-anchor-id="applications-in-phonology">Applications in Phonolog