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Introducing maxent.ot: an R package for Maximum Entropy constraint grammars
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2026
Abstract
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This paper presents maxent.ot, a package for doing phonological analysis using Maximum Entropy Optimality Theory written in the statistical programming language R. R has become the de facto standard for doing statistical analysis in linguistic research, and this package allows phonologists to create and disseminate MaxEnt OT analyses in R. A central goal of the package is to support reproducible research and to allow the crucial components of a MaxEnt analysis to be performed conveniently and with only a basic knowledge of R programming. The paper first presents a tutorial on MaxEnt constraint grammars and how to use maxent.ot to perform a simple analysis. We then turn to more advanced features of the package, including model comparison, regularization, and cross-validation.
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Thanks to the audience at the 2022 Annual Meeting on Phonology at UCLA for their useful feedback and discussion. Thanks also to the valuable feedback from two anonymous reviewers.
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