corp.ling.stats is a research blog by Sean Wallis focusing on the intersection between corpus linguistics research and mathematical statistics and probability theory. About this blog • Latest…
I am very pleased to announce that my new book, Statistics in Corpus Linguistics Research, is available to pre-order and will be published in November 2020 by Routledge. Drawing on over ten years’ of work, and containing a large quantity of material never published before, the book is written for corpus linguistics researchers of all… Continue reading Coming soon… Statistics in Corpus Linguistics Research (Routledge)→
Introduction Over the last year, the field of psychology has been rocked by a major public dispute about statistics. This concerns the failure of claims in papers, published in top psychological journals, to replicate. Replication is a big deal: if you publish a correlation between variable X and variable Y – that there is an… Continue reading The replication crisis: what does it mean for corpus linguistics?→
Abstract Paper (PDF) This paper summarises a methodological perspective towards corpus linguistics that is both unifying and critical. It emphasises that the processes involved in annotating corpora and carrying out research with corpora are fundamentally cyclic, i.e. involving both bottom-up and top-down processes. Knowledge is necessarily partial and refutable. This perspective unifies ‘corpus-driven’ and ‘theory-driven’… Continue reading What might a corpus of parsed spoken data tell us about language?→
The perspective that the study of linguistic data should be driven by studies of individual speaker choices has been the subject of attack from a number of linguists. The first set of objections have come from researchers who have traditionally focused on linguistic variation expressed in terms of rates per word, or per million words.… Continue reading Is language really “a set of alternations?”→
Spoken categories, modal verbs and change over time In a recently-published paper, Bowie, Wallis and Aarts (2013) demonstrate that observations regarding changes in the frequency of modal verbs over time are highly sensitive to differences in genre (‘register’ or ‘text category’). Our paper, although based on spoken British English, may shed some light on a… Continue reading Genre differences and experimental observations→
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Recently, I have been reviewing some work I conducted developing confidence intervals for Cramér’s ϕ, building on Bishop, Fienberg and Holland (1975). Finalising the edit for my forthcoming book (Wallis, 2020), I realised that Yvonne Bishop and colleagues had provided a formula for the variance of χ² without saying so explicitly! The authors show how… Continue reading The variance of chi-square→
Introduction In Plotting the Wilson distribution (Wallis 2018), I showed how it is possible to plot the distribution of the Wilson interval for all values of α. This exercise is revealing in a number of ways. First, it shows the relationship between the Normal distribution of probable Binomial observations about the population, ideal or given… Continue reading Plotting the Clopper-Pearson distribution→
Abstract Paper (PDF) Wallis (2013) provides an account of an empirical evaluation of Binomial confidence intervals and contingency test formulae. The main take-home message of that article was that it is possible to evaluate statistical methods objectively and provide advice to researchers that is based on an objective computational assessment. In this article we develop… Continue reading Further evaluation of Binomial confidence intervals→
Introduction Elsewhere in this blog we introduce the concept of statistical significance by considering the reliability of a single sampled observation of a Binomial proportion: an estimate of the probability of selecting an item in the future. This allows us to develop an understanding of the likely distribution of what the true value of that… Continue reading Deconstructing the chi-square→
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