Abstract
The task of finding the distinctive features to best describe a vowel inventory seems nondeterministic. The set of features must describe the inventory in as few features as possible, while providing feature contrasts between vowels to satisfy the active phonological processes in the language. Several previous algorithms have been able to define contrastive vowels for a vowel inventory with a pre-specified set of distinctive features, but these algorithms fail without prior knowledge of the feature set. In this thesis, I have created and implemented the Best Binary Split algorithm, a deterministic algorithm which is able to find the set of distinctive features and the set of contrastive vowel pairs for a language using only the vowel inventory of that language, a global feature hierarchy, and a deterministic process for reranking that hierarchy for each language based on the patterning of natural classes of vowels in that language.