Sample OTSoft files
Here is an extremely simple file formatted according to the OTSoft–HaLP conventions. To submit it to HaLP, download it to a local directory and then upload it on the Weight Finder page.
HaLP displays its output in html. The constraint weights that it finds will make the selected output candidates correctly optimal: the sum of the weighted violations for each optimal candidate will be lower than that of any other candidate in its tableau.
The weights HaLP finds are minimal in that they have the lowest summed total, subject to two conditions: Every constraint is minimally 1, and every sub-optimal candidate must receive a score that is at least 1 greater than the optimal candidate. In the bat-pet.txt example, this means that Max, which is violated by the optimal forms, has the minimal value of 1. NoCoda is at 2 so that the candidates with codas receive a score that is 1 greater than the optimal forms.
If there is no weighting that will make the selected outputs correctly optimal, HaLP returns a verdict of infeasible. By switching the selected optima in bat-pet.txt, we can create such a case.
The following file illustrates a somewhat more complicated case of constraint conflict: Lardil truncation as analyzed by Prince and Smolensky (1993:2004, ch. 7). The inputs, candidates, constraints, and violation marks are those from Prince and Smolensky's tableaux in section 7.3. Above each input is a comment indicating the number of the tableau in the published (2004) version. A list of phonetic character substitutions and other minor changes is included in the file, in comment lines. We've set the minimum constraint weight to 0.
The Web-based version of HaLP can handle quite large problems. Here is an example of a made-up feasible system that contains 200 inputs, with 10 candidate outputs each, and 30 constraints.
Systems larger than this cause problems for browsers (the output HTML pages can be very large). HaLP's algorithms can solve much larger systems, though. We will eventually make a downloadable version for really large problems. If you have such a problem that you'd like to solve now, please contact us.