Software Details
| Title: | MiniJudge: Judgment Collecting Software |
|---|---|
| Submitter: | James Myers |
| Description: | MiniJudge: Software for 'minimalist' experimental syntax http://www.ccunix.ccu.edu.tw/~lngproc/MiniJudge.htm The recent rapid growth of the experimental syntax literature, in both size and sophistication, suggests that the theoretical syntax community is finally starting to acknowledge the empirical unreliability of judgments collected in an overly informal way. Unfortunately, syntacticians interested in improving the quality of their data rarely have the time or training needed to conduct full-fledged experiments. MiniJudge is a free, open-source software tool designed to allow syntacticians without any training in psycholinguistics or statistics to perform quick and reliable tests of empirical hypotheses on native-speaker judgments. Though designed specifically for syntax judgment experiments, MiniJudge may also be used for collecting judgments relating to pragmatics, semantics, morphology or phonology. So far it has been used to run syntax and morphology experiments on English, Chinese, and Taiwan Sign Language (the last by having the experimenter sign printed survey forms for judges). It has also been used to run pilot studies and to help teach basic concepts in experimental design. There is much more about MiniJudge on the info page, accessible via the above address. Currently the only incarnation of MiniJudge is MiniJudgeJS, which is simply an HTML Web page containing JavaScript (a fuller-featured Java version is in the works). It runs the statistics by interfacing with R, the world's foremost free, open-source statistical package (http://www.r-project.org/). Feedback of any and all sorts is most welcome: * Incompatibility reports (it's only been tested in Firefox and Internet Explorer in Windows XP, though in theory it should work on any post-1997 system). * Other bug reports. * Requests for new features. * Reports of errors, lack of acknowledgments, and other problems with the online text. * Criticism from syntacticians, psycholinguists, statisticians, and programmers. * Questions (eventually there will be a FAQ). The current version number of MiniJudgeJS is 0.9.9 (essentially 'beta'), and it will stay there for a while. Updates can be identified by changes in the dateline. |
| Linguistic Field(s): |
Computational Linguistics General Linguistics Psycholinguistics Syntax |
| LL Issue: | 17.1779 |
| Date Posted: | 13-Jun-2006 |
