A probabilistic treatment also allows relatively simple learning methods (e.g., Boersma and Hayes (2001)) since inference never has to backtrack from a contradiction.
our method searches a continuous space of phonologies S θ , all of which are consistent with every mapping S. we always have S θ (s | u) > 0 for all u, s, so our current guess of S θ is always capable of explaining the observed words, albeit perhaps with low probability.