Google Research Blog
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Enhancing Linguistic Search with the Google Books Ngram Viewer
Thursday, October 17, 2013
Posted by Slav Petrov and Dipanjan Das, Research Scientists
Our book scanning effort, now in its eighth year, has put tens of millions of books online. Beyond the obvious benefits of being able to discover books and search through them, the project lets us take a step back and learn what the entire collection tells us about culture and language.
Launched in 2010 by Jon Orwant and Will Brockman, the Google Books Ngram Viewer lets you search for words and phrases over the centuries, in English, Chinese, Russian, French, German, Italian, Hebrew, and Spanish. It’s become popular for both casual explorations into language usage and serious linguistic research, and this summer we decided to provide some new ways to search with it.
With our interns Jason Mann, Lu Yang, and David Zhang, we’ve added three new features. The first is wildcards: by putting an asterisk as a placeholder in your query, you can retrieve the ten most popular replacement. For instance,
what noun most often follows “Queen” in English fiction
? The answer is “Elizabeth”:
This graph also reveals that the frequency of mentions of the most popular queens has been decreasing steadily over time. (Language expert Ben Zimmer shows some other interesting examples in
his Atlantic article
.) Right-clicking collapses all of the series into a sum, allowing you to see the overall change.
Another feature we’ve added is the ability to search for inflections: different grammatical forms of the same word. (Inflections of the verb “eat” include “ate”, “eating”, “eats”, and “eaten”.) Here, we can see that
the phrase “changing roles” has recently surged in popularity in English fiction
, besting “change roles”, which earlier dethroned “changed roles”:
Curiously, this switching doesn’t happen
when we add non-fiction into the mix
: “changing roles” is persistently on top, with an odd dip in the late 1980s. As with wildcards, right-clicking collapses and expands the data:
Finally, we’ve implemented the most common feature request from our users: the ability to search for multiple capitalization styles simultaneously. Until now, searching for
common capitalizations of “Mother Earth”
required using a plus sign to combine ngrams (e.g., “Mother Earth + mother Earth + mother earth”), but now the case-insensitive checkbox makes it easier:
As with our other two features, right-clicking toggles whether the variants are shown.
We hope these features help you discover and share interesting trends in language use!
Opening up Course Builder data
Wednesday, October 09, 2013
Posted by John Cox and Pavel Simakov, Course Builder Team, Google Research
Course Builder
is an experimental, open source platform for delivering massive online open courses. When you run Course Builder, you own everything from the production instance to the student data that builds up while your course is running.
Part of being open is making it easy for you to access and work with your data. Earlier this year we shipped a tool called ETL (short for extract-transform-load) that you can use to pull your data out of Course Builder, run arbitrary computations on it, and load it back. We
wrote a post
that goes into detail on how you can use ETL to get copies of your data in an open, easy-to-read format, as well as write custom jobs for processing that data offline.
Now we’ve taken the next step and added richer data processing tools to ETL. With them, you can
build data processing pipelines
that analyze large datasets with MapReduce. Inside Google we’ve used these tools to
learn from the courses we’ve run
. We provide example pipelines ranging from the simple to the complex, along with formatters to convert your data into open formats (CSV, JSON, plain text, and XML) that play nice with third-party data analysis tools.
We hope that adding robust data processing features to Course Builder will not only provide direct utility to organizations that need to process data to meet their internal business goals, but also make it easier for educators and researchers to gauge the efficacy of the massive online open courses run on the Course Builder platform.
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