The slides we discussed on Jan. 12 in the semantics seminar are available here. You can also take a look at Kruschke (2011), chapters 3 and 4.

John Kruschke has created JAGS versions of all the programs in “Doing Bayesian Data Analysis”.

Unlike BUGS, JAGS runs on MacOS, Linux, and Windows. JAGS has other features that make it more robust and user-friendly than BUGS. I recommend that you use the JAGS versions of the programs.

For more …

Winter 2012 Seminar in Semantics (Linguistics, UCSC):

• Statistical & Cognitive Modeling for Formal Semantics

See the syllabus and AB’s teaching page for more information.

An introduction to ordinal probit regression: simulated data for an ordinal probit ‘t-test’, i.e., an ordinal probit regression with only one predictor (a factor with 2 levels); frequentist analysis in R using the “ordinal” package; Bayesian analysis using WinBUGS and JAGS: ordinal-probit-regression.r.

A very nice compact argument for Bayesian methods can be found in John Kruschke‘s Bayesian Data Analysis, WIREs Cognitive Science 1, 658-676. Here’s the very beginning of the article (followed by a section entitled “The road to NHST is paved with good intentions”):

This brief article assumes that …

Plan: linear regression wrap-up; introduce logistic regression models, maximum likelihood estimation of their parameters and the frequentist quantification of the uncertainty associated with those estimates; introduce the Bayesian approach to regression models with the goal of having a flexible way to estimate all sorts of logistic regression models, including binary …

A script introducing basic lexical semantics, syntax and compositional semantics notions and tools with NLTK: NLTK-syn-sem.py, Dowty-et-al.cfg, mygrammar.cfg.

Plan: talk about the analysis of a subpart of the quantifier-scope-tagged corpus that Scott AnderBois, Robert Henderson and I have been working on over the last year; we will focus exclusively on sentences with 2 quantifiers.

Main goal: provide motivation for continuing the discussion of linear regression from last quarter …

Corpus-based evaluation of centering theory: Centering: A Parametric Theory and Its Instantiations, Poesio et al (2004) (discussion led by Bern)

Intro to anaphora resolution algorithms (Hobbs 1978, Lappin & Leass 1994, Centering Theory): anaphora resolution.ppt

Tutorial on regression (see the references in the R scripts for sources):

1. Warm-up (skewness, histograms …

Why corpus linguistics? Here’s part of the conclusion of Abney (1996) (“Statistical methods and linguistics”); see also chapter 1 of Manning & Schuetze (1999) (“Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing”):

In closing, let me repeat the main line of argument as concisely as I can. Statistical methods—by which I …