By looking at the statistical properties of words, researchers can analyze large bodies of text, such as all the articles published in the Wall Street Journal over five years, and form conclusions about the frequency with which individual words are used in language. That type of study requires collaboration between researchers in the departments of applied mathematics, computer science, and cognitive and linguistic sciences. University support for interdisciplinary research at Brown has facilitated the study of computational linguistics here, said Johnson. The implications for language optimization research range from speech recognizers to Internet search engines, which rely on key words to locate documents, said Johnson. Depends on the words around it, said Johnson.
Probability is a factor.