Why is statistics difficult?

Imagine you are somewhere on a road that you have never been on before. Picture it. It’s peaceful and calm. A car comes down the road. As it gets to a corner, the driver appears to lose control, and the car crashes into a wall. Fortunately the lone driver is OK but they can’t recall exactly what happened.

Let’s think about what you experienced. The car crash might involve a number of variables an investigator would be interested in.

How fast was the car going? Where were the brakes applied?

Look on the road. Get out a tape measure. How long was the skid before the car finally stopped?

How big and heavy was the car? How loud was the bang when the car crashed?

These are all physical variables. We are used to thinking about the world in terms of these kinds of variables: velocity, position, length, volume and mass. They are tangible: we can see and touch them, and we have physical equipment that helps us measure them.

Point tests and multi-point tests for separability of homogeneity

Introduction

I have been recently reviewing and rewriting a paper for publication that I first wrote back in 2011. The paper (Wallis forthcoming) concerns the problem of how we test whether repeated runs of the same experiment obtain essentially the same results, i.e. results are not significantly different from each other.

These meta-tests can be used to test an experiment for replication: if you repeat an experiment and obtain significantly different results on the first repetition, then, with a 1% error level, you can say there is a 99% chance that the experiment is not replicable.

These tests have other applications. You might be wishing to compare your results with those of others in the literature, compare results with different operationalisation (definitions of variables), or just compare results obtained with different data – such as comparing a grammatical distribution observed in speech with that found within writing.

The design of tests for this purpose is addressed within the t-testing ANOVA community, where tests are applied to continuously-valued variables. The solution concerns a particular version of an ANOVA, called “the test for interaction in a factorial analysis of variance” (Sheskin 1997: 489).

However, anyone using data expressed as discrete alternatives (A, B, C etc) has a problem: the classical literature does not explain what you should do.

Gradient and point tests

Figure 1: Point tests (A) and gradient tests (B), from Wallis (forthcoming).

The rewrite of the paper caused me to distinguish between two types of tests: ‘point tests’, which I describe below, and ‘gradient tests’.

Detecting direction in interaction evidence

IntroductionPaper (PDF)

I have previously argued (Wallis 2014) that interaction evidence is the most fruitful type of corpus linguistics evidence for grammatical research (and doubtless for many other areas of linguistics).

Frequency evidence, which we can write as p(x), the probability of x occurring, concerns itself simply with the overall distribution of a linguistic phenomenon x – such as whether informal written English has a higher proportion of interrogative clauses than formal written English. In order to calculate frequency evidence we must define x, i.e. decide how to identify interrogative clauses. We must also pick an appropriate baseline n for this evaluation, i.e. we need to decide whether to use words, clauses, or any other structure to identify locations where an interrogative clause may occur.

Interaction evidence is different. It is a statistical correlation between a decision that a writer or speaker makes at one part of a text, which we will label point A, and a decision at another part, point B. The idea is shown schematically in Figure 1. A and B are separate ‘decision points’ in a given relationship (e.g. lexical adjacency), which can be also considered as ‘variables’.

Figure 1: Associative inference from lexico-grammatical choice variable A to variable B (sketch).

This class of evidence is used in a wide range of computational algorithms. These include collocation methods, part-of-speech taggers, and probabilistic parsers. Despite the promise of interaction evidence, the majority of corpus studies tend to consist of discussions of frequency differences and distributions.

In this paper I want to look at applications of interaction evidence which are made more-or-less at the same time by the same speaker/writer. In such circumstances we cannot be sure that just because B follows A in the text, the decision relating to B was made after the decision at A.

UCL Summer School in English Corpus Linguistics 2017

I am pleased to announce the fifth annual Summer School in English Corpus Linguistics to be held at University College London from 5-7 July.

The Summer School is a short three-day intensive course aimed at PhD-level students and researchers who wish to get to grips with Corpus Linguistics. Numbers are deliberately limited on a first-come, first-served basis. You will be taught in a small group by a teaching team.

Each day begins with a theory lecture, followed by a guided hands-on workshop with corpora, and a more self-directed and supported practical session in the afternoon.

The replication crisis: what does it mean for corpus linguistics?

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 increase in the use of the progressive over time, say, and that increase is statistically significant, you expect that this finding would be replicated were the experiment repeated.

I would strongly recommend Andrew Gelman’s brief history of the developing crisis in psychology. It is not necessary to agree with everything he says (personally, I find little to disagree with, although his argument is challenging) to recognise that he describes a serious problem here.

There may be more than one reason why published studies have failed to obtain compatible results on repetition, and so it is worth sifting these out.

In this blog post, what I want to do is try to explore what this replication crisis is – is it one problem, or several? – and then turn to what solutions might be available and what the implications are for corpus linguistics.

POS tagging – a corpus-driven research success story?

Introduction

One of the longest-running, and in many respects the least helpful, methodological debates in corpus linguistics concerns the spat between so-called corpus-driven and corpus-based linguists.

I say that this has been largely unhelpful because it has encouraged a dichotomy which is almost certainly false, and the focus on whether it is ‘right’ to work from corpus data upwards towards theory, or from theory downwards towards text, distracts from some serious methodological challenges we need to consider (see other posts on this blog).

Usually this discussion reviews the achievements of the most well-known corpus-based linguist, John Sinclair, in building the Collins Cobuild Corpus, and deriving the Collins Cobuild Dictionary (Sinclair et al. 1987) and Grammar (Sinclair et al. 1990) from it.

In this post I propose an alternative examination.

I want to suggest that the greatest success story for corpus-based research is the development of part-of-speech taggers (usually called a ‘POS-tagger’ or simply ‘tagger’) trained on corpus data.

These are industrial strength, reliable algorithms, that obtain good results with minimal assumptions about language.

So, who needs theory?

Why Chomsky was Wrong About Corpus Linguistics

Introduction

When the entire premise of your methodology is publicly challenged by one of the most pre-eminent figures in an overarching discipline, it seems wise to have a defence. Noam Chomsky’s famous objection to corpus linguistics therefore needs a serious response.

“One of the big insights of the scientific revolution, of modern science, at least since the seventeenth century… is that arrangement of data isn’t going to get you anywhere. You have to ask probing questions of nature. That’s what is called experimentation, and then you may get some answers that mean something. Otherwise you just get junk.” (Noam Chomsky, quoted in Aarts 2001).

Chomsky has consistently argued that the systematic ex post facto analysis of natural language sentence data is incapable of taking theoretical linguistics forward. In other words, corpus linguistics is a waste of time, because it is capable of focusing only on external phenomena of language – what Chomsky has at various times described as ‘e-language’.

Instead we should concentrate our efforts on developing new theoretical explanations for the internal language within the mind (‘i-language’). Over the years the terminology varied, but the argument has remained the same: real linguistics is the study of i-language, not e-language. Corpus linguistics studies e-language. Ergo, it is a waste of time.

Argument 1: in science, data requires theory

Chomsky refers to what he calls ‘the Galilean Style’ to make his case. This is the argument that it is necessary to engage in theoretical abstractions in order to analyse complex data. “[P]hysicists ‘give a higher degree of reality’ to the mathematical models of the universe that they construct than to ‘the ordinary world of sensation’” (Chomsky, 2002: 98). We need a theory in order to make sense of data, as so-called ‘unfiltered’ data is open to an infinite number of possible interpretations.

In the Aristotelian model of the universe the sun orbited the earth. The same data, reframed by the Copernican model, was explained by the rotation of the earth. However, the Copernican model of the universe was not arrived at by theoretical generalisation alone, but by a combination of theory and observation.

Chomsky’s first argument contains a kernel of truth. The following statement is taken for granted across all scientific disciplines: you need theory to analyse data. To put it another way, there is no such thing as an ‘assumption free’ science. But the second part of this argument, that the necessity of theory permits scientists to dispense with engagement with data (or even allows them to dismiss data wholesale), is not a characterisation of the scientific method that modern scientists would recognise. Indeed, Beheme (2016) argues that this method is also a mischaracterisation of Galileo’s method. Galileo’s particular fame, and his persecution, came from one source: the observations he made through his telescope.