Bayesian Methods for Language Sciences

Bayesian methods can be applied to research in the language sciences in at least two major ways. On the one hand, they can be used for the development and analysis of probabilistic language models of the kind used, for example, in corpus based computational linguistics. On the other hand, they can be used for the statistical analysis of empirical data obtained, for example, from psycholinguistic experiments. The aim of this workshop is to provide an introduction to both of these applications of Bayesian methods. Given that probabilistic language modelling is a vital part of modern computational linguistics, and that statistical data analysis is an essential part of psycholinguistics, Bayesian methods are potentially relevant to a wide range of researchers in the language sciences. It is hoped, therefore, that this workshop will be potentially appealing to language science researchers from Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics or Psychology backgrounds.