OT SIMPLE - a construction-kit approach to Optimality Theory implementation

Abstract

This paper details a simple approach to the implementation of Optimality Theory (OT, Prince and Smolensky 1993) on a computer, in part reusing standard system software. In a nutshell, OT's GENerating source is implemented as a BinProlog program interpreting a context-free specification of a GEN structural grammar according to a user-supplied input form. The resulting set of textually flattened candidate tree representations is passed to the CONstraint stage. Constraints are implemented by finite-state transducers specified as `sed' stream editor scripts that typically map ill-formed portions of the candidate to violation marks. EVALuation of candidates reduces to simple sorting: the violation-mark-annotated output leaving CON is fed into `sort', which orders candidates on the basis of the violation vector column of each line, thereby bringing the optimal candidate to the top. This approach gave rise to OT SIMPLE, the first freely available software tool for the OT framework to provide generic facilities for both GEN and CONstraint definition. Its practical applicability is demonstrated by modelling the OT analysis of apparent subtractive pluralization in Upper Hessian presented in Golston and Wiese (1996).