A program I have used for a linguistics analysis offers the option of using log likelihood or chi-squared to calculate the keyness of a word (Keyness being the actual frequency of a word in a text in comparison to the expected frequency based upon its frequency in a reference text) The program has a default setting of using log likelihood, so I happily left it at that and let it compute the statistics I needed. I do however, need to briefly explain the difference between the two methods, and possibly why LL is suggested as the better option.
I haven't studied maths in a long time. Can someone explain the difference between chi-squared and log likelihood, in simpleton terms for me?