Harmonic grammar with linear programming

Harmonic Grammar (HG) is a model of linguistic constraint interaction in which well-formedness is calculated as the sum of weighted constraint violations. We show how linear programming algorithms can be used to determine whether there is a weighting for a set of constraints that fits a set of linguistic data. Our associated software package HaLP provides a practical tool for studying large and complex linguistic systems in the HG framework, and thus it can be valuable for comparing HG’s linear model to the model of constraint ranking assumed in Optimality Theory. We describe the translation from linguistic systems to linear systems, and we report on some recent work modeling HG typologies using HaLP.

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