Izabel Ilie
2026
Learning tone sandhis in Structural Optimality
Izabel Ilie | Andrew Lamont | Brandon Prickett
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2026
Izabel Ilie | Andrew Lamont | Brandon Prickett
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2026
This paper examines the learnability of different types of tone sandhi in Structural Optimality, a constraint-based framework that posits hierarchical scales and defines constraints over the scales. Approached as a hidden structure problem, we show that Expectation Driven Parameter Learning can acquire these grammars, but that their properties can make learning difficult.