Related papers: Statistics against irritations: a response to Dick…
I report the results of the test, where the takers had to tell the prose of Charles Dickens from that of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who is considered by many to be the worst writer in history of letters. The average score is about 50%, which is…
Textual humor is enormously diverse and computational studies need to account for this range, including intentionally bad humor. In this paper, we curate and analyze a novel corpus of sentences from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest to…
The present article is the reply to the discussion of our earlier "Not only defended but also applied" (arXiv:1006.5366, to appear in The American Statistician) that arose from our memory of a particularly intemperate anti-Bayesian…
Based on data from a large-scale experiment with human subjects, we conclude that the logarithm of probability to guess a word in context (unpredictability) depends linearly on the word length. This result holds both for poetry and prose,…
We focus on the statistics of word occurrences and of the waiting times between such occurrences in Blogs. Due to the heterogeneity of words' frequencies, the empirical analysis is performed by studying classes of "frequently-equivalent"…
We investigated long range correlations in two literary texts, Moby Dick by H. Melville and Grimm's tales. The analysis is based on the calculation of entropy like quantities as the mutual information for pairs of letters and the entropy,…
Recently long range correlations were detected in nucleotide sequences and in human writings by several authors. We undertake here a systematic investigation of two books, Moby Dick by H. Melville and Grimm's tales, with respect to the…
The paper "Evaluation of Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey" [1] proposes a new, much shorter, version of the CLASS based on standard factor analysis. In this comment we explain why we believe the analysis that is used is…
Testing hypotheses is an issue of primary importance in the scientific research, as well as in many other human activities. Much clarification about it can be achieved if the process of learning from data is framed in a stochastic model of…
The $T$-test is probably the most popular statistical test; it is routinely recommended by the textbooks. The applicability of the test relies upon the validity of normal or Student's approximation to the distribution of Student's statistic…
By positing a relationship between naturalistic reading times and information-theoretic surprisal, surprisal theory (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) provides a natural interface between language models and psycholinguistic models. This paper…
Psychology is a discipline standing at the crossroads of hard and social sciences. Therefore it is especially interesting to study bibliometric characteristics of psychology journals. We also take two adjacent disciplines, neurosciences and…
We examine the tension between academic impact - the volume of citations received by publications - and scientific disruption. Intuitively, one would expect disruptive scientific work to be rewarded by high volumes of citations and,…
The mathematical distinction between prose and verse may be detected in writings that are not apparently lineated, for example in T. S. Eliot's "Burnt Norton", and Jim Crace's "Quarantine". In this paper we offer comments on appropriate…
I am presenting a first-ever scientific collection of short sayings on probability and statistics expressed by most various men of science, many classics included, from antiquity to Kepler to our time. Quite understandably, the reader will…
Interest in the mathematical structure of poetry dates back to at least the 19th century: after retiring from his mathematics position, J. J. Sylvester wrote a book on prosody called $\textit{The Laws of Verse}$. Today there is interest in…
The main hypothesis about Thomas Bayes's intentions to write his famous Essay on probability is that he wanted to refute the arguments of David Hume against the reliability of the occurrence of miracles, published in 1748. In this paper we…
We consider the problem of hypotheses testing with the basic simple hypothesis: observed sequence of points corresponds to stationary Poisson process with known intensity. The alternatives are stationary self-exciting point processes. We…
The likelihood function plays a crucial role in statistical inference and experimental design. However, it is computationally intractable for several important classes of statistical models, including energy-based models and simulator-based…
Automated reasoning about uncertain knowledge has many applications. One difficulty when developing such systems is the lack of a completely satisfactory integration of logic and probability. We address this problem directly. Expressive…