Turing's formula revisited*
Zhiyi Zhang, Hongwei Huang · Journal of Quantitative Linguistics · 2007
A simple frequentist's justification of Turing's formula, an improvement to Turing's formula by means of reduced bias, a clarification of the relationships among various objects related to Turing's formula, a conservative confidence interval to Turing's target, and a conservative testing procedure using observed rank-frequencies under a hypothesized known infinite-dimensional multinomial distribution are given in this paper. As an example, the authorship of the nine-stanza poem “Shall I Die?” is tested against Shakespeare's canon and statistically significant evidence is found for a difference in word type usage.