Probability for Linguists

Probability is the branch of mathematics concerned with describing the relative likelihood of things. Probabilitic methods have proven fruitful in characterizing patterns in natural language. Here are some starting points for teaching yourself the math.

• One of the best books on the subject of probability and natural language is Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing.

• John Goldsmith has a good tutorial called Probability for Linguists that uses examples from natural language.

• The Probability Tutorial Using Dice explains the mathematical concepts using a familiar real world example.

• The Maximum Mutual Information Criterion Tutorial explains how to use mutual information in feature reduction. A sample script shows how this works.

-- BillMcNeill - 21 Jan 2005