Invitaci\'on al estudio estad\'istico del lenguaje

TL;DR

This paper explores the interdisciplinary connection between linguistics and statistics, emphasizing the importance of statistical tools in analyzing language through association, distribution, and similarity measures.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical framework for applying statistical methods to language analysis, illustrating their practical relevance in terminology and documentation.

Findings

Statistical tools complement linguistic intuition.

Analysis of word association and distribution in corpora.

Methods for measuring similarity between language units.

Abstract

Invitation to the statistical study of language: The topic of this presentation is the interdisciplinary nexus between linguistics and statistics. It targets linguists, for whom it may have a theoretical interest, or professionals that work with language, for whom it may have a practical interest. It focuses on the concept of the combinatory probability of words from three different perspectives: a) the studies of association between the units that are combined, b) the distribution of this combination of units in the corpus, and finally c) the ways of measuring similarity between units according to the combination possibilities. All these topics are addressed in a strictly theoretical fashion and are illustrated by examples of practical application in terminology and in documentation. The objective is to demonstrate that the use of statistical tools in these fields is a necessary complement to the researcher's intuition.