Related papers: Statistics against irritations: a response to Dick…
How do learners acquire knowledge of what is unacceptable without negative evidence? Construction Grammar proposes statistical preemption: exposure to a conventional form (e.g., "donated the books to the library") preempts structurally…
We conduct an incentivized experiment on a nationally representative US sample \\ (N=708) to test whether people prefer to avoid ambiguity even when it means choosing dominated options. In contrast to the literature, we find that 55\% of…
Suppose that in a multiple choice examination the leading digit of the correct options follows Benford's Law, while the the leading digit of the distractors are uniform. Consider a strategy for guessing at answers that selects the option…
Goodness-of-fit tests gauge whether a given set of observations is consistent (up to expected random fluctuations) with arising as independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) draws from a user-specified probability distribution known…
We introduce SCDE, a dataset to evaluate the performance of computational models through sentence prediction. SCDE is a human-created sentence cloze dataset, collected from public school English examinations. Our task requires a model to…
Survey respondents may give untruthful answers to sensitive questions when asked directly. In recent years, researchers have turned to the list experiment (also known as the item count technique) to overcome this difficulty. While list…
We demonstrate that the concerns expressed by Garcia et al. are misplaced, due to (1) a misreading of our findings in [1]; (2) a widespread failure to examine and present words in support of asserted summary quantities based on word usage…
Recent observations in the theory of verse and empirical metrics have suggested that constructing a verse line involves a pattern-matching search through a source text, and that the number of found elements (complete words totaling a…
Four centuries before modern statistical linguistics was born, Leon Battista Alberti (1404--1472) compared the frequency of vowels in Latin poems and orations, making the first quantified observation of a stylistic difference ever. Using a…
In this paper we build on earlier observations and theory regarding word length frequency and sequential distribution to develop a mathematical characterization of some of the language features distinguishing isometrically lineated text…
A method is presented for evaluating authors on the basis of citations. It assigns to each author a citation score which depends upon the number of times he is cited, and upon the scores of the citers. The scores are found to be the…
A new indicator, a real valued $s$-index, is suggested to characterize a quality and impact of the scientific research output. It is expected to be at least as useful as the notorious $h$-index, at the same time avoiding some its obvious…
An analyst is tasked with producing a statistical study. The analyst is not monitored and is able to manipulate the study. He can receive payments contingent on his report and trusted data collected from an independent source, modeled as a…
We discuss the paper "Citation Statistics" by the Joint Committee on Quantitative Assessment of Research [arXiv:0910.3529]. In particular, we focus on a necessary feature of "good" measures for ranking scientific authors: that good measures…
Hidden structural patterns in written texts have been subject of considerable research in the last decades. In particular, mapping a text into a time series of sentence lengths is a natural way to investigate text structure. Typically,…
Public-facing science communication is important in garnering interest, engagement, and trust in science. Social media platforms provide scientists with opportunities to reach broader audiences, yet many resist adopting social media writing…
Inertia and context-dependent choice effects are well-studied classes of behavioural phenomena. While much is known about these effects in isolation, little is known about whether one of them "dominates" the other when both can potentially…
In this paper, we propose a statistical test to determine whether a given word is used as a polysemic word or not. The statistic of the word in this test roughly corresponds to the fluctuation in the senses of the neighboring words a nd the…
In research policy, effective measures that lead to improvements in the generation of knowledge must be based on reliable methods of research assessment, but for many countries and institutions this is not the case. Publication and citation…
The problem addressed concerns the determination of the average number of successive attempts of guessing a word of a certain length consisting of letters with given probabilities of occurrence. Both first- and second-order approximations…