Learn One Thing A Day

In the last week from a colleague and in the The Big Bang Theory (Season 7 episode 11) I heard a nice and simple English expression that uses the American and British pronunciations of the word tomato. The expression by itself is very simple: " Tomato tomato " but what matters is the prounciation: " toe-MAY-toe , toe-MAH-toe " The meaning of the "tomato, tomato" is to express more clearly that two things supposed to be different, aren't or just have minor differences. It originates from the 1937 song "Let's call the whole thing off" by George Gershwin: " ... you like tomatoes [toe-may-toes] and I like tomatoes [toe-mah-toes]... " (from http://www.ishs.org/ ) Reference: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tomato_tomato

Today I wanna talk you about Google Ngram Viewer http://books.google.com/ngrams A very, very valuable tool from Google! First of all .. what is a n-gram ? According to wikipedia : In the fields of computational linguistics and probability, an n-gram is a contiguous sequence of n items from a given sequence of text or speech. An n-gram could be any combination of letters. However, the items in question can be phonemes, syllables, letters, words or base pairs according to the application. The n-grams typically are collected from a text or speech corpus. So basically, a word is an  n-gram of size 1 (or unigram )  while " I am " is an n-gram of size 2 (or  bigram ), " the view is awesome " is an ngram of size 4 and so on... Now that you know what a ngram is let's see what Google Ngram can do for us. When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases (the ngrams )  have occurred in a corpus...