Survey on information requirements on the Google Books Ngram Corpus
Fabian Richter, Federico Matteucci, Peter Reimann, Klemens Böhm · International Journal of Digital Humanities · 2025
Abstract The development of word frequencies over time is the subject of research in different branches of the humanities. Large temporal n-gram corpora have been created for this purpose, most notably the Google Books Ngram Corpus . While the concrete research questions vary between the different research works, there are similarities in the more abstract underlying information requirements, i.e., the structure of queries against a potential database system. Based on a systematic literature review, we extract these information requirements, leading to a categorization of existing articles into macro-areas of information requirements. Furthermore, we collect existing query systems for temporal n-gram corpora and evaluate their expressiveness regarding the information requirements we found.