Course:COGS200/2017W1/NGramAssignment/KwanLam
Compare words
The NGram above compares the different levels of education institutions. The most interesting time frame is between 1920-1940 when high school was more widely used than university. A hypothesis for this sudden peak of high school may be due the global conflicts during the time, resulting in many young adults to be forced or encouraged to work instead of continue their education.
The NGram above compares the different degrees achievable from college or university. As expected, education has become more and more significant to society as depicted by the steady increase of the use of the words.
Wildcard search
The NGram above compares the different types of transportation used by people (travel by *). We can clearly see that "travel by land" has continuously decreased. This is probably because during the last two centuries, transportation by land has become more and more varied. As a result, people are forced to be more specific by noting exactly what type of land transportation is used, which is why phrases like "travel by car" and "travel by land" increase in usage.
Inflection search
The NGram above is for the inflection search of the word write (write_INF). One of the interesting areas of this graph is the sudden increase of the words "written" and "wrote" between 1920-1970. One reason this may have happened is because during this time societies were growing exponentially in terms of size and technology. More and more resources were readily available, which allowed scientists and researchers to collect data more efficiently. More importantly, this also allowed them to further prove or disprove previous works, requiring the use of the words "written" and "wrote".
Search for a word using Part-of-Speech tags
The NGram above compares the use of travel as a noun with the use of travel as a verb. It is interesting how the noun usage of travel continues to increase ever since the 1840s. This may be due to the continued increase of transportation methods which led to more publicly available transportation. As a result, this constant change allowed more and more people to "speak" about their travels.
Search for Parts of Speech (not a specific word)
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The NGram above compares the usage of nouns. The most intriguing may be the drastic fall of the word God. The first thing that comes to mind is probably the significance of Christianity during the Roman Empire era. Also, globalization has exposed people to many different religions, possibly causing the belief in God to lessen due to realizing that there are many religions (many Gods).