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 now available from Routledge. Drawing on more than ten years of research, and containing a large quantity of material never published before, the book is written for corpus linguistics researchers of all kinds, from students of corpus linguistics wishing… Continue reading Out now… 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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Introduction In a previous post, Plotting the Wilson distribution, we saw how the probability density function (pdf) for Wilson score intervals (colloquially, ‘Wilson distributions’) could be estimated using delta approximation. See also Wallis (2021: 297). These curves were often far from Normal (the bell-curve, Gaussian) in shape, being squeezed into the probability range P =… Continue reading Plotting the Newcombe-Wilson distribution→
Introduction That students find statistics difficult is undeniable. But the source of this difficulty, and solutions to it, is a matter of some debate. I have made the case previously that the source of the difficulty is essentially cognitive, because we do not directly experience distributions of averages of samples, but have to count them… Continue reading ‘S-values’, ‘p-values’ and conceptualising statistics→
Introduction A confidence interval for an observed proportion p at an error level α may be defined precisely as the range of values for a population probability, proportion or rate P that is not significantly different from p at error level α. This definition arises from the properties of what Wallis (2013, 2021) calls ‘the… Continue reading Confidence intervals and replication intervals→
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, 2021), 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→
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