N-grams

You can look at n-grams of words in TED Talks. Click on the N-gram button on the main page to switch to N-gram mode.

An n-gram is a sequence of words of n items. Looking at frequencies of various n-grams, you can find out what linguistic sequences are more entrenched in the language and, possibly, what are less so.

N-gram tabs

TCSE offers four n-gram sizes:

• 1-gram: Single word frequencies
• 2-gram: Two-word sequences (bigrams)
• 3-gram: Three-word sequences (trigrams)
• 4-gram: Four-word sequences

Here is a sample output returned in response to the search key wait:

Position filter buttons

When n-gram results are displayed, you will see a set of filter buttons above the results table:

• n-gram ALL: Shows all n-grams containing the search term in any position (default)
• n-gram #1: Shows only n-grams where the search term appears in position 1
• n-gram #2: Shows only n-grams where the search term appears in position 2
• (and so on, up to #n)

For example, when searching for wait in 2-gram mode, clicking #1 shows n-grams where wait comes first (e.g., wait for, wait until), while #2 shows n-grams where wait comes second (e.g., can't wait, please wait).

Chunk-based n-grams

In the results table, some rows are displayed with a light blue background. These represent noun phrase chunks — multi-word units that function as a single grammatical unit (e.g., immune system, solar system). Rows without the light blue background are simple word-level n-grams.

This chunk-based analysis helps you identify meaningful multi-word expressions beyond simple word sequences. Click on any row to search for its instances in the transcript corpus.

Collocation analysis

The Colloc 2 and Colloc 3 tabs provide collocation analysis for your search term. See Collocation analysis for details.

Tips

• Click on any n-gram in the results to search for its instances in the transcript corpus
• N-gram frequencies reflect actual usage patterns in TED Talks