
Workshop
Bayesian statistics for word processing research
Location: School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon
Instructor: João Veríssimo (University of Lisbon)
Dates: 9–10 July 2026, 9.30am – 5.00pm
Workshop materials: All datasets and code will be available at the OSF repository here.
Cost: Free to attend for conference participants!
Description
Bayesian analyses have been increasingly adopted in psychology and linguistics as a replacement (or addition) to traditional frequentist methods. This workshop highlights the advantages of Bayesian statistics to the word processing researcher, by providing both an introduction to its foundational principles and a practical tutorial on estimation and hypothesis testing using the brms R package. The examples build up from simple linear regression to more advanced mixed-effects models and showcase the various aspects of a Bayesian workflow.
Schedule
Day 1: Introduction to Bayesian statistics
Session 1 (9.30am – 12.30pm)
– Foundations of Bayesian statistics
– Posterior distributions
Session 2 (2pm – 5pm)
– Prior distributions
– Prior choice recommendations
Day 2: Mixed-effects models / Hypothesis testing
Session 1 (9.30pm – 12.30pm)
– Fixed and random effects
– Prior and posterior checks
– Choosing a response family
Session 2 (2.00pm – 5.00pm)
– Estimation vs. hypothesis testing
– Bayes factors