Is there a way to use finite-state techniques to implement OT?
There is a lot of literature on this topic. For example, you could start with Karttunen’s paper The Proper Treatment of Optimality in Computational Linguistics ( in the Proceedings of FSMNLP’98. International Workshop on Finite-State Methods in Natural Language Processing, June 29-July 1, 1998, pages 1-12, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey). Karttunen argues that Gen is most likely a regular relation and that many if not all OT constraints represent regular languages. But the fact that OT in principle requires unlimited counting means that even the classical OT of Smolensky and Prince (1993) cannot be modeled by a finite-state device. The same is true, even without the counting issue, of some other variants of OT such as John McCarthy’s Sympathy Theory and Benua’s Output-output constraints. Nevertheless, finite-state tools can be very useful for developing OT descriptions in the classical style. The script Finnish OT Prosody implements Paul Kiparsky’s OT account of basic Finnish proso
