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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Syntactically annotated Ngrams for Google Books

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

In this thesis, we present a new edition of the Google Books Ngram Corpus, describing how often words and phrases were used over a period of five centuries, in eight languages; it aggregates data from 6% of all books ever published. This new edition introduces syntactic annotations: words are tagged with their part-of-speech, and head-modifier dependency relationships are recorded. We generate these annotations automatically from the Google Books text, using statistical models that are specifically adapted to the historical text found in these books. The new edition will facilitate the study of linguistic trends, especially those related to the evolution of syntax. We present our initial findings from the annotated Ngrams in the new edition, including studies of the change in various words' primary parts of speech over time, and to find the words most closely related to a given set of topics.

Degree

thesis:*
Department dc:contributor.department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Grantor dc:publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Year dc:date.issued
2012

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Lin, Yuri, M. Eng. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Dorothy Curtis and Slav Petrov.

Subjects

dc:subject × 1

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.
Language dc:language.iso
eng

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier.uri
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/77501
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/77501

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
MIT
Base URL
dspace.mit.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Lin, Yuri, M. Eng. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Syntactically annotated Ngrams for Google Books. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/77501