  This paper describes a novel approach to constructing phonotactic models. The
underlying theoretical approach to phonological description is the
multisyllable approach in which multiple syllable classes are defined that
reflect phonotactically idiosyncratic syllable subcategories. A new
finite-state formalism, OFS Modelling, is used as a tool for encoding,
automatically constructing and generalising phonotactic descriptions.
Language-independent prototype models are constructed which are instantiated on
the basis of data sets of phonological strings, and generalised with a
clustering algorithm. The resulting approach enables the automatic construction
of phonotactic models that encode arbitrarily close approximations of a
language's set of attested phonological forms. The approach is applied to the
construction of multi-syllable word-level phonotactic models for German,
English and Dutch.
