A Simple Proof That Optimality Theory Is Computationally Intractable Author(s): William J.

Idsardi Reviewed work(s): Source: Linguistic Inquiry, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Spring, 2006), pp. 271-275 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4179363 . Accessed: 30/07/2012 13:51
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Remarks and Replies

A Simple Proof That Optimality Theory Is Computationally Intractable WilliamJ. Idsardi Adapting arguments fromEisner1997,2000, thisremark a provides forOptimality simple that thegeneration proof problem Theory (Prince and Smolensky The proofneedsonly the binary 2004) is NP-hard. evaluation of constraints andusesonlyconstraints generally employed in theOptimality Incontrast, Theory literature. rule-based derivational systemsareeasilycomputable, to theclassof polynomialbelonging timealgorithms, P (Eisner 2000). Keywords: Optimality Theory, NP-hard computational complexity, 1 Introduction Eisner (1997), building on work by Ellison (1994), offers a proof that the generationproblem for Primitive OptimalityTheory is NP-hard.This proof involves constructing"an intermediate candidate set consisting of all permutationsof r digits" (Eisner 2000:29). Problems involving permutationsets are well known in the literatureon computationalcomplexity and intractability (see, e.g., Garey and Johnson 1979; and, for specifically linguistic examples, Barton, Berwick, and Ristad 1987). However, Eisner's use of an idiosyncraticversion of OptimalityTheory (OT) and the unusualnatureof some of the constraintsemployed in his proof have limited the impact of this importantresult. In this remark,I reconstructEisner's proof using only constrainttypes attested in actual OT analyses (e.g., Prince and Smolensky 2004, Kager 1999, Ito and Mester as suggested in Eisner 2000, I achieve this result assuming only the binary 2003). Furthermore, evaluation of constraints(i.e., constraintsare satisfied or violated only once per candidate;there is no gradientevaluation of any sort). 2 Proof The standard methodfor proving that a new problemis NP-hardis to encode a known intractable problem using the vocabularyand resources of the new problem. If there is a polynomial-time

I would like to thankthe anonymousreviewers for their comments, and especially for their advice on clarifying the difference between NP-hardand NP-complete problems.
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reductionto the new problem, then the new problem is NP-hard,' as Garey and Johnson (1979) explain.
Once we have proved a single problem NP-complete, the procedurefor proving additionalproblems NP-completeis greatlysimplified. Given a problemHIE NP, all we need do is show that some already known NP-complete problem Hl'can be transformedto Hl. (Garey and Johnson 1979:45) Although we have restrictedour discussions so far mainly to problems that belong to NP, it should be apparentthat the techniques used for proving NP-completeness also can be used for proving that problemsoutside of NP are hard.Any decision problemH, whethera memberof NP or not, to which we can transform an NP-completeproblemwill have the propertythatit cannotbe solved in polynomial time unless P = NP. We might say that such a problem Hl is "NP-hard," since it is, in a sense, at least as hard as the NP-complete problems. (Garey and Johnson 1979:109)

as in Eisner 1997, is the directedHamiltonianpath The NP-completeproblemto be transformed, problem (Garey and Johnson 1979:60, 199, Cameron 1994:167). (A Hamiltonianpath is a tour that does not revisit any of the vertices in a graph.)
A Hamiltonianpath in a directed graph G = (V, A) is an orderingof V as (v>, v2 . = IVI,such that (vi, vi+1) E A for 1 ' i < n. (Garey and Johnson 1979:60) v,), where n

The trick now is to construct an OT grammarthat computes directed Hamiltonianpaths. We begin by takingan alphabet(i.e., a phonemeinventory)of n elementsI = {a, b, c, . . . }representing the vertices of G in the obvious way (a = v,, b = v2, etc.). We then form an input word of n elements, /abc ... / (in fact, any input word of n elements is sufficient). The infinite candidate set generatedfrom this input by Gen is then evaluated by the following constrainthierarchy.I will present the constraintsin a stratified hierarchyfor ease of exposition; this is not in fact necessary for the proof, the ordering over the relevant constraintsbeing immaterialsince the solutions (the winning candidates)will not violate any constraints. In the first stratum, we have the set of constraintsof the form *x, wherex T I. This eliminates any candidateswith phonemes not in the alphabetfor the problem.In OT, such constructionsare used to ban certainsounds entirelyfrom a language;examples are the statementthatEnglish does not contain any clicks and the statementthat English does not contain the high front rounded vowel [y] (see Ito and Mester 2003:17-18). This reduces the candidateset to the infinite set 1*, the set of strings over I. In the next stratum,we have MAX and DEPfor segments, whose combined effect is to limit the candidateset to strings of the same length as the input string. This reduces the candidateset at this point to the finite set In, which has nn candidates.Nothing more is needed to do this work
' A problem is NP-hardif it is at least as hard as any of the problems in NP. An NP-complete problem is an NPhard problem that is also known to be in NP. In some circumstances,then, NP-hardproblems can be harderto solve (i.e., even more intractable)than NP-complete problems;see Garey and Johnson 1979 for furtherdiscussion. Restricted subsets of OT, such as those using only the binary-evaluated constraintsemployed in section 2, can be shown to be within NP. However, since there is no clear proposal specifying the class of allowable constraintsin OT, it is not possible to show generally that OT problemslie within NP; hence, the results show that OT generationis NP-hard,though, in fact, it may be even harder.

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than a binary evaluation of MAX and DEPover the entire form. We do not even need to assume the unboundedevaluation of constraintsinvoked in McCarthy2003.
for each instance of the markedstructure It is sufficient for any constraintto assign one violation-mark or unfaithfulmapping in the candidateunder evaluation. (McCarthy2003:130; emphasis added)

Since there are candidateswithout any MAX or DEPviolations, it is unnecessaryto assign more than one violation markper candidatefor presentpurposes.It is not necessaryto assign violation marksfor each MAX or DEPviolation, as the candidatewill be ruledout at the first such violation. In the next stratum,we have the set of self-conjoined constraints(Ito and Mester 2003:29) -ot {*a2, *b2, *c2, . .. }. Self-conjoinedconstraintsforbid two instances of the same segment (or segment type in the case of incomplete feature specifications) within the same domain, here the word (i.e., the whole candidate). Such constraintsare found in Japanese (Lyman's Law), Sanskrit(Grassmann'sLaw), Semitic (Greenberg1950), and many otherlanguages, as discussed by Ito and Mester (2003:30 and passim). Again, these constraintscan be evaluated in a binary fashion, as a single violation will be enough to rule out a candidate,therebeing candidateswithout any violations of these constraints.At this point, the candidateset has been reducedto the set of over I, which has n! candidates. strings of length n without repetitions,that is, the permutations We have now constructeda brute-forceenumerationof all possible paths over V, regardlessof whether or not the edges in the paths are elements of A. In the next stratum,we have the constraintsagainst including sequences of vertices not in G, that is, restrictingthe candidatesto those with paths drawnfrom A. For this purpose,we have constraintsof the form *c4 where o = vi, i = vj, and vivjT A. Such constraintsagainstcertain bigramsequences are the breadand butterof standardphonological analyses, as they bar certain sequences of segments, such as *NC (Kager 1999, Ito and Mester 2003) and countless other cases. All candidatesremainingafter this stratumare directedHamiltonianpaths (so, if desired, we can insert the MPARSE constraintat this point in the hierarchy,so that the null candidatewill win if there are no directed Hamiltonianpaths). Thus, we have transformedan NP-complete problem(findingdirectedHamiltonian paths)into an OT problemandthereforehave demonstrated that the generationproblemfor OT is NP-hard.The transformation is obviously polynomial-time because the constructionof the inputis linear-timeand the constructionof the requiredconstraint hierarchyis at most quadratic-time, the inputhavingn elementsandthe constraint hierarchy having at most n2 + n + 3 constraints(n2 possible sequenceconstraints; n self-conjoinedconstraints; and MAX, DEP, and MPARSE). 3 Conclusions In this remark,following the work of Eisner (1997, 2000), I have offered a simple proof that the generationproblem for OT is NP-hard.Under the currentunderstanding of computationalcomNP (even though this hypothesis still evades proof), this makes OT plexity results for which P =A in general computationallyintractable.In contrast, rule-based derivational systems are easily computable,belonging to the class of polynomial-timealgorithms,P (Eisner2000:32). OtherNPcomplete problems could serve as the basis for additional such proofs, including for example

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3SAT by adaptingthe Kimmo 3SAT argumentpresentedin Barton, Berwick, and Ristad 1987 and PATH WITH FORBIDDEN PAIRS (Garey and Johnson 1979:203) by adaptingthe present proof. The present proof uses only binary evaluation of constraintsand employs only simple OT constraintsof types generallyfound in OT analysesof naturallanguages.The crux of the problem, as pointed out by Eisner (2000:29), is the generationof an intermediatecandidateset of permutations over an alphabet. We accomplished this with MAX, DEP, and the set of self-conjoined constraints *oX2. It is importantto notice that it is not the initial infinitude of candidatesthat rendersthe problem computationallyintractable; rather,it is the exponentialgrowth-ratein this relevant intermediatecandidate space.2 Thus, any attemptto modify OT in order to render it tractablewill have to eliminate (or severely limit) the use of Gen or one of these computationally constrainttypes, presumablythe set of self-conjoinedconstraints.However, such restrictionsmust still somehow allow their use in the problemsthat Ito and Mester (2003) address,or invent new mechanismsto deal with effects like those capturedby Lyman's Law and Grassmann'sLaw. But any such new mechanisms must be constructedso as not to be able to be used to construct permutationsets or to model other intractablecomputationalproblems. References
Barton, G. Edward, Jr., Robert C. Berwick, and Eric S. Ristad. 1987. Computational complexityand natural language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Cameron, Peter J. 1994. Combinatorics:Topics, techniques,algorithms.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eisner, Jason. 1997. Efficient generation in Primitive Optimality Theory. In Proceedings of the 35th annual meeting of the Associationfor ComputationalLinguistics, 313-320. Eisner, Jason. 2000. Easy and hard constraint ranking in Optimality Theory: Algorithms and complexity. In Finite-state phonology: Proceedings of the 5th Workshopof the ACL Special Interest Group in ComputationalPhonology (SIGPHON),ed. by Jason Eisner, Lauri Karttunen, and Alain Theriault,

22-33.
Ellison, Mark T. 1994. Phonological derivation in Optimality Theory. In Proceedingsof the 15thInternational Conferenceon ComputationalLinguistics (COLING),1007-1013. Garey, Michael R., and David S. Johnson. 1979. Computers and intractability: A guide to the theoryof NPcompleteness.New York: W. H. Freeman. Greenberg, Joseph H. 1950. The patterning of root morphemes in Semitic. Word6:162-181. Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. 2003. Japanese morphophonemics: Markednessand word structure.Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

A reviewer makes two relevant points. First, in Eisner's proof if the grammaris given beforehand,the winners can be computedin reasonabletime. As the reviewer notes, Eisner (1997:319) also offers three appropriate rejoindersto this observation,which are also appropriate here.In the presentcase, for instance,such a techniquewill requireexponential space for the storageof the compiled grammar,as it will potentiallyencode all permutations of I. Thus, the precompiled grammarsimply tradesspace-complexityfor time-complexityand does not solve the inherentcomputationaldifficulties. Second, the reviewer suggests a review of "average-case" or "real-world" performance.Unfortunately,these measures do not lend themselves to the algebraicevaluationof complexity, and computersimulationsfor this purposeare beyond the scope of the present remarks(though a most useful area for furtherresearch).

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Kager, Rene. 1999. OptimalityTheory.Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press. McCarthy,John J. 2003. OT constraintsare categorical.Phonology 20:75-138. Prince, Alan, and Paul Smolensky. 2004. OptimalityTheory:Constraintinteractionin generativegrammar. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. Departmentof Linguistics 1401 Marie Mount Hall Universityof Maryland College Park, Maryland20742-7505 idsardi@umd.edu

In Defense of a Quantificational Account of Definite DPs

Daniela Isac Two types of argumentssupporta quantificationalview of definite DPs. First, definite DPs sharepropertieswith otherquantifiedexpressions. In particular, they patterntogetherin antecedent-contained deletion constructions, they show weak crossovereffects, and at least some of them interactscopally with other quantifiedexpressions. Second, the apparentfailure of (some) definite DPs to interact scopally with other quantifiedexpressions and to exhibit island effects stems from two propertiesof definite DPs: they are all principalfilters, and the witness set of singulardefiniteDPs is a singleton.These two properties have the effect of renderingthe wide and narrow scope readings of definite DPs indistinguishable. Keywords:quantificationaldefinite DPs, principalfilters, singletons Two types of accounts have been proposed in the literature for the wide scope interpretation of definite DPs: (a) quantificational accounts, which assume that definite DPs undergo Quantifier Raising (QR) at LF to a wide scope position, and (b) referential approaches, which assume that definite DPs behave like proper names and are interpreted in situ, without moving at LF. The former view originated with Russell (1905) and was adopted by Milsark (1974), Barwise and Cooper (1981), May (1985), Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet (1990), and others. The latter view was initially proposed by Frege (1892) and then defended by Strawson (1950), Kaplan (1972), Hornstein (1984), and others.

I am gratefulto CharlesReiss, Fred Mailhot, and two anonymousreviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. Remainingerrorsare my own. This work was supportedby CanadianEmploymentInsurancefunds grantedto the author as maternitybenefits.
Linguistic Inquiry,Volume 37, Number 2, Spring 2006 275-288 e 2006 by the MassachusettsInstituteof Technology