Significance Testing in NLP

What is Significance Testing?

 

Applications of Significance Testing

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Testing Statistical Significance in Natural
Language Processing

1. Paper by Dror et al.

2. Gives basic introduction to significance testing in NLP

Types of Tests

1. Parametric: distribution known beforehand

2. Non-parametric: distribution unknown

Parametric Tests

1. Paired student's t-test

Non-Parametric Tests

1. Two types: sampling-based and sampling-free

2. Sampling-based: consider evaluation metric values

3. Sampling-free: do not consider metric values

Sampling-Free Tests

1. Sign test

2. McNemar's test

3. Cochran's Q test

4. Wilcoxon signed-rank test

Sampling-Based Tests

1. Pitman's permutation test

2. Paired bootstrap test

Selection of significance tests

Significance Testing in NLP

By Anjali Bhavan

Significance Testing in NLP

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