PrefaceFounded in 1994, the International Quantitative Linguistics Association (IQLA) aimsat promoting the development of theoretical, empirical, and applied QuantitativeLinguistics (QL) and fostering an effective communication among scientists that workin this highly interdisciplinary field. This multidisciplinary background enables us toshare methods and findings across the boundaries of the individual sub-disciplines,languages, and methodological areas. Quantitative linguistics cannot only becharacterised as a strongly co-operative science but this property can be considered asan essential principle.IQLA organizes on a regular basis the QUAntitative LInguistics COnference(QUALICO) that represents the most important meeting for IQLA members and forQL scholars. The first eight conferences in this series took place in: Trier (1991),Moscow (1994), Helsinki (1997), Prague (2000), Athens, Georgia (2003), Graz(2009), Belgrade (2012) and Olomouc (2014). The 9th meeting, Qualico2016, tookagain place in Trier. The scientific program was organized over 3 days in August 24-28 in two parallel sessions. The lecture halls were rented in the DeutscheRichterakademie (German Academy of European Law).This book includes a selection of the papers presented at Qualico2016 from variousareas of QL. The contributions highlight the richness of this branch of research and thewide range of different topics, methods and approaches available in QL.A substantial amount of contributions are focussed on research in morphology.Klyshinsky, Logacheva and Nivre study morphological ambiguity, aiming at assistingnatural language processing, by defining six types of word ambiguity and computingtheir distributions in nine languages. In order to measure grammatical ambiguity,Wang and Guo introduce polyfunctionality, which refers to the number of parts ofspeech a word can be attributed to. They suggest that a universal model can capture thedistributions on data from German, Dutch, English and Chinese. Galieva andNevzorova report an attempt to assess the morphological complexity of the Tatarlanguage. PawÅowski, Topolski, Malak, KocoÅ and MarciÅczuk compare thedifferences between the distributions of vocabulary in the entire corpus and in itssubcorpora (consisting of individual parts of speech), on data from Polish and explainthe reasons. Vulanovic and Ruff present a formula, based on set theory, to measurehow much a linguistic system violates the One-Meaning-One-Form principle.Two contributions to this volume involve stylometrics. Cortelazzo, Nadalutti, Ondelliand Tuzzi work on an Italian case of authorship attribution and thorough methods oftext clustering investigate the distinctive traits of Elena Ferrante's writing style with aspecific focus on the presumed similarity with other novels written by Italian authorsfrom Naples and its surroundings. The study proposed by Sun and Jin on a Japanesenovel Otome no minato, which is published under the name of Yasunari Kawabata butdisputed to be written by Tsuneko Nakazato. This study identifies the authorship byexamining stylometric features such as part-of-speech bi-grams, particle bi-grams andphrase patterns and classifiers such as correspondence analysis, hierarchical clusteranalysis, etc.The contribution by Embleton, Uritescu and Wheeler deal with a dialectometricproblem. They test the relationship between the linguistic distance and geographicdistance on data from a Romanian dialect. Their study involves as an innovativefeature, taking the popularity of telecommunication into consideration: The researchersmeasure geographic distance by both travel distance and travel time.Sanada demonstrates a syntactic research on Japanese complement and adjunct. Thequantitative properties of the two sentence components including frequency, lengthand position are investigated in various aspects.Benesová, Faltýnek and ZámeÄník propose a discussion on functional explanation inquantitative linguistics, especially in synergetic linguistics. The authors focus on thephilosophic reflection on epistemological and methodological bases and suggest areconstruction of the functional model of explanation in synergetic linguistics.The conference was evaluated both by the organisers and the participants as anothersuccessful event.The Editors,Lu Wang, Reinhard Köhler, Arjuna Tuzzi
