Despite attempts to apply the lessons of causal modelling observed correlations typical entangled bipartite quantum systems, Wood and Spekkens argue that any model purporting explain these must be fine tuned; is, it violate assumption faithfulness. The faithfulness is a principle parsimony, intuition behind basic compelling: when no statistical correlation exists between occurrences pair events...

Emergent effects (McCarthy & Prince 1994) are the result of phonological constraints or rankings that only reveal themselves in a specific context. That is, they have no discernable effect in the regular phonology of a language but become apparent when speakers perform particular tasks. Crucially, they reveal knowledge that was not learned directly from ambient language data. Emergent effects h...

Directed graphical models provide a useful framework for modeling causal or directional relationships for multivariate data. Prior work has largely focused on identifiability and search algorithms for directed acyclic graphical (DAG) models. In many applications, feedback naturally arises and directed graphical models that permit cycles arise. However theory and methodology 15 for directed grap...

Work in phonology and morphology consistently recognizes that affixes show a strong tendency to be less marked than roots crosslinguistically. Within Optimality Theory, this observation has been dealt with through the imposition of a universally-fixed ranking, known as the Root-Affix Faithfulness Metaconstraint (McCarthy and Prince 1995), which states that faithfulness to root material universa...

I wish to thank Alok Bhargava for organizing a discussion of this interesting paper by Adams et al. My discussion will focus on quite generic philosophical, statistical, and modelling issues that arise when inferring causal e0ects from complex panel and time series data. The analysis of Adams et al. appears to be driven by the following philosophical proposition: when the sample size is large a...

Abstract We find that the requirement of model interpretations to be faithful is vague and incomplete. With interpretation by textual highlights as a case study, we present several failure cases. Borrowing concepts from social science, identify problem misalignment between causal chain decisions (causal attribution) attribution human behavior (social attribution). reformulate faithfulness an ac...

The field of generative metrics attempts to characterize the tacit knowledge of fluent participants in a metrical tradition. An adequate metrical analysis will characterize the set of phonological structures constituting well-formed verse in a particular tradition and meter. Structures that meet this criterion are termed metrical. An adequate analysis will also specify differences of complexity...

In this paper I discuss the theoretical implications of a vowel height transfer in Esimbi for three current issues in the analysis of featural phenomena in Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993). Esimbi exhibits a remarkable surface distribution of vowels: a greater number of vowel height contrasts occur in prefixes than in roots. On the face of it, this appears to belie the generalizati...