The Design, Implementation, and Use of the Ngram Statistics Package

The Ngram Statistics Package (NSP) is a flexible and easy-to-use software tool that supports the identification and analysis of Ngrams, sequences of <SMALL> N</SMALL> tokens in online text. We have designed and implemented NSP to be easy to customize to particular problems and yet remain general enough to serve a broad range of needs. This paper provides an introduction to NSP while raising some general issues in Ngram analysis, and summarizes several applications where NSP has been successfully employed. NSP is written in Perl and is freely available under the GNU Public License.