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What we learned from 5 million books - Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel

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2,907 Questions Answered

TED Talk

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Have you played with Google Labs' Ngram Viewer? It's an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works, and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words. (Filmed at TEDxBoston.)

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What Ngram trend implies that we are losing interest in the past?

a

There is an increase in frequency of Ngrams of past years (ex. “1960”)

b

There is a decrease in the length of time an n-gram of a past year (ex. “1960”) is frequently used

c

There is an increase in frequency of Ngrams describing the present year (ex. “2013)

d

The Ngram trend does not show loss of interest in the past but rather loss of interest in the future

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Speaker Erez Lieberman Aiden , Jean-Baptiste Michel

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