Taking Google’s Ngram For a Spin
Eric Schultz As part of a recent parents weekend at a fine New England educational institution, I had the pleasure of watching Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, demonstrate Google’s Ngram Viewer (Ngram section starts around 9:30). Released in December 2010, Ngram (Wikipedia tells us ) is a “phrase-usage graphing tool” that charts the yearly count of selected n-grams (letter combinations), or words and phrases. The Google database currently includes 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008 containing 500 billion words in American English, British English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese Peter Norvig’s example that day illustrated the power of the Ngram database, comparing the word combinations “The United States is” and “The United States are.” The result seems logical: the singular “is” becomes the dominant verb after the American Civil War. This was a relatively straightforward example, however, and I should warn as you r...