SPOT tutorial

SPOT: an application for automatic generation and evaluation of trees

Jennifer Bellik and Nick Kalivoda, UC Santa Cruz

Manually generating and evaluating all the possible candidates for a syntax-prosody analysis situation in Optimality Theory is prohibitively time-consuming. In this tutorial, we present a solution to this problem — the JavaScript application Syntax Prosody in OT (SPOT; Bellik, Bellik & Kalivoda 2017). SPOT’s graphical user interface makes it easy to create, view and download a violation tableau, which can then be manipulated using other tools such as OTWorkplace. We will demonstrate how to use SPOT to automatically generate and evaluate prosodic candidates by walking through a case-study together. To get the most out of the tutorial, bring a laptop and download the codebase from Github.

SPOT is available online:

The tutorial presentation slides are here.