RE: [Corpora-List] Statistical tests for corpus studies

From: Rayson, Paul (rayson@exchange.lancs.ac.uk)
Date: Wed May 07 2003 - 18:22:30 MET DST

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    Adam, Josephine,

    But there is a problem with the Mann-Whitney test of too many zeros in the slices, as your IJCL paper points out Adam. For example, in the LOB and Brown comparison only words with a frequency of 30 or more (in the joint corpus) had few enough zeros for the test to be applicable. This means that 92% of the word types in the joint corpus were omitted from the comparison.

    Regards,
    Paul.

    Dr. Paul Rayson
    Director of UCREL
    University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language
    Computing Department, Lancaster University,
    Lancaster, LA1 4YR, UK.
    Web: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/users/paul/
    Tel: +44 1524 593786 Fax: +44 1524 593608

    -----Original Message-----
    From: Adam Kilgarriff [mailto:adam.kilgarriff@itri.brighton.ac.uk]
    Sent: 07 May 2003 10:45
    To: Josephine Lo
    Cc: CORPORA@HD.UIB.NO
    Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Statistical tests for corpus studies

    Josephine,

    chi-square will probably not give you what you want, nor will
    log-likelihood - my paper on "Comparing Corpora" (Int Jnl Corpus
    Linguistics 2001) explains why. Non-parametric tests are more suitable,
    I found the Mann-Whitney test did the job well. It involves chopping
    each corpus up into same-size slices.

    Regards,

        Adam

    Josephine Lo wrote:

    > Dear all,
    >
    > As a lay-man to statistics, I wish to get some advice on the tests
    > suitable for comparing the frequency of a specific type of word in
    > corpora of different genre. Having in mind are Chi-square and ANOVA
    > but I'm not sure they are the appropriate ones.
    >
    > Thanks in advance
    >
    >
    > Josephine Lo
    > Research Assistant
    > Dept. of English and Communication
    > City University of Hong Kong
    > 

    -- 

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