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<Paper uid="P96-1049">
  <Title>On Reversing the Generation Process in Optimality Theory</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993) is a constraint-based phonological and morphological system that allows violable constraints in deriving output surface forms from underlying forms. In OT a system of constraints selects an &amp;quot;optimal&amp;quot; surface output from a set of candidates. The methodology allows succinct analyses of phenomena such as infixation and reduplication that were difficult to describe under sets of transformational rules.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Several computational methods for OT have been produced within the short amount of time since Prince and Smolensky's paper (Ellison, 1994; Tesar, 1995; Hammond, 1995). These systems were designed as generation systems, deriving surface forms from an underlying lexicon. There have, however, been no computational models of OT parsers that derive underlying forms from the surface form. z In this work, we lay the theoretical groundwork for using OT as a parsing tool.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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