Paper by Gaja Jarosz published in Phonology
A paper by Gaja Jarosz appears in the most recent issue of the journal Phonology. Titled Learning with hidden structure in Optimality Theory and Harmonic Grammar: beyond Robust Interpretive Parsing, the paper explores the relative merits of constraint ranking vs. weighting in the context of a major outstanding learnability problem in phonology: learning in the face of hidden structure. Two novel parsing strategies are introduced in the paper and applied to learning algorithms for both probabilistic ranking and weighting. The novel parsing strategies yield significant improvements in performance, asymmetrically improving performance of OT learners, and challenging earlier results suggesting an advantage of Harmonic Grammar over OT. The paper can be found here.