The heart of our approach

Our approach differs significantly from that of McEnery and Wilson's textbook, as it does from Charniak's. The big difference is that we take a thoroughly Bayesian approach to all the necessary statistics, with several major consequences:

• In general we aim for a higher level of mathematical rigour than the other sources.
• We need to introduce some basic probability theory early on, in order to motivate the Bayesian approach.
• We don't present algorithms and statistical tests in the usual cookbook style. We feel that creative data-intensive linguistics demands a flexible approach to statistics, and we hope that a systematically Bayesian approach will give students a secure basis from which to apply old principles to new problems.