Enhanced Search with Wildcards and Morphological Inflections in the Google Books Ngram Viewer

Jason Mann, David Zhang, Lu Yang, Dipanjan Das, Slav Petrov

Abstract: We present a new version of the Google Books Ngram Viewer, which plots the frequency of words and phrases over the last five centuries; its data encompasses 6% of the world’s published books. The new Viewer adds three features for more powerful search: wildcards, morphological inflections, and capitalization. These additions allow the discovery of patterns that were previously difficult to find and further facilitate the study of linguistic trends in printed text.