Ling 235: Quantitative and
Probabilistic Explanation in Linguistics |
Course Information |
Lecture: 3-4 units, MW 3:15-4:45 Building 300, Room 303.
Overview:
This course will cover quantitative modeling and analysis of language. Quantitative modeling and analysis is becoming increasingly important in both competence- and performance-based approaches to language, including formal linguistics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics, because of its ability to explain noncategorical distributional patterns. The course will cover literature in all three of these fields, focusing on issues including variation in word order, argument realization, phonological realization, and online sentence processing. We'll be providing course participants with the tools to understand and formulate quantitative models that explain linguistic data, and then how to test them rigorously against empirical data. Along the way, we'll provide tutorial material in statistical methods crucial for all sorts of linguistic work, including contingency tables, linear regression, generalized linear models/logistic regression, and stochastic Optimality Theory.
Organization:
Part of the class meeting time will be devoted to seminar-style coverage of “linguistics” – discussion-oriented sessions where we look closely at linguistics articles that use quantitative models – and part will be devoted to tutorial-style coverage of “statistics” – foundational and tutorial material covering the ideas and methods needed to do quantitative linguistic research. For the “statistics” sessions, we will be using the SPSS statistics software package. There will be small weekly assignments to help solidify understanding of the material we cover in the statistics sessions.
What this course will not cover:
The course will not cover any kind of data-gathering
techniques. We will assume that
you have or can get some raw data to work with. If you think you need more
skills in collecting data, you should consider another course that covers this,
such as Ling 203 or Ling 155B. You
might also benefit from contacting Neal Snider, the corpus TA, who can help you
with browsing and collecting data from the large variety of natural language
corpora that are available at Stanford.
Take a look at the Linguistics corpora webpage for more information: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/linguistics/corpora/
For students to be able to understand, build, and test probabilistic models of linguistic phenomena.
Christopher Manning
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Roger
Levy
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Office: Gates Bldg. Room 158
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Office: Gates Bldg. Room 114
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Office Hours: Tue 3-4, Wed 2-3
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Office Hours: Mon 10-11, Thurs 10-11
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Phone: (650) 723-7683
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Phone: (650) 725-6965
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Fax: (650) 725-2588
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Fax: (650)
723-5666
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E-mail: manning@stanford.edu
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Email: rog@stanford.edu
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Graduate students and advanced undergraduates specializing in linguistics or symbolic systems.
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If you’d like to get a head start on things it’d be good to know about in this course, here are the recommendations:
There is no required text.
You can use SPSS on a Windows, Macintosh, or Unix machine. SPSS is pre-installed on one of the Windows machines and one of the Macintosh machines in the Linguistics department computer cluster. A relatively old version is also pre-installed on most of the Sweet Hall SUN UNIX machines, including the elaines, the trees, and junior. There are also available copies in the library: on Windows machines 1-6 in the Jonsson Reading Room, and on Macs in Meyer Library. However, we highly recommend that you obtain your own current copy for use on your own computer. The best way to do this seems to be to license a full version of SPSS for a year through Stanford at the following website:
http://www.stanford.edu/services/softwarelic/product_spss.html
It’s cheaper to buy yearly licenses in bulk, so please let us know soon if you want to get a yearly license and we’ll make a group order. (Note: the "student" edition of SPSS is too crippled to be useful; the "gradpack" is perfectly functional.)
Finally, you can download a free 14-day evaluation copy of SPSS for Windows through the SPSS website: http://www.spss.com
The course work will be:
The other expectation is reading papers and participation in class presentations.