Adapting arguments from Eisner 1997, 2000, this remark provides a simple proof that the generation problem for Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 2004) is NP-hard. The proof needs only the binary evaluation of constraints and uses only constraints generally employed in the Optimality Theory literature. In contrast, rule-based derivational systems are easily computable, belonging to the cla...

Optimality Theory, a constraint-based phonology and morphology paradigm, has allowed linguists to make elegant analyses of many phenomena, including infixation and reduplication. In this work-in-progress, we build on the work of Ellison (1994) to investigate the possibility of using OT as a parsing tool that derives underlying forms from surface forms. a. Derivational Phonology b. Optimality Th...

This study aims to apply the proposal of a connectionist version of Optimality Theory (Bonilha, 2004) in order to analyze the data which were previously considered in Alves (2004), regarding the acquisition, by Brazilian Portuguese speakers, of English complex codas which characterize the English morpheme “-ed”. The analysis which was carried out in Alves (2004), developed through the standard ...

We investigate two formalizations of Optimality Theory, a successful paradigm in linguistics. We first give an order-theoretic counterpart for the data and process involved in candidate evaluation. Basically, we represent each constraint as a function that assigns every candidate a degree of violation. As for the second formalization, we define (after Samek-Lodovici and Prince) constraints as o...

We show that the stopping criteria used in many support vector machine (SVM) algorithms working on the dual can be interpreted as primal optimality bounds which in turn are known to be important for the statistical analysis of SVMs. To this end we revisit the duality theory underlying the derivation of the dual and show that in many interesting cases primal optimality bounds are the same as kno...

How do we assign causal responsibility for others’ decisions? The present experiments examine the possibility that an optimality constraint is used in these attributions, with agents considered less responsible for outcomes when the decisions that led to those outcomes were suboptimal. Our first two experiments investigate scenarios in which agents are choosing among multiple options, varying t...

We consider amathematical model in the form of a system of ordinary differential equations (ODE) foroptimally administrating cancer treatments. The ODE systemdynamics characterized by locating equilibrium points and stability propertiesare determined by linearization and usingappropriate Lyapunovfunctions. By applying optimal control theory, we seek to minimize the cost function associated with...

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