A gen­er­a­tion ago, stu­dents would say they “grad­u­ated from col­lege,” but now they “grad­uate col­lege.” These tiny fluc­tu­a­tions in the way we use lan­guage are ubiq­ui­tous because “chil­dren don’t learn the lan­guage their par­ents actu­ally speak,” according to David Smith, an assis­tant pro­fessor in the Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence.

The dis­crep­an­cies don’t sig­nif­i­cantly impede our ability to under­stand our chil­dren and grand­chil­dren, he said, “but accu­mu­la­tion of small changes over long periods of time is enough to make our Eng­lish sound a lot dif­ferent from Shake­speare, Chaucer, or Beowulf.”

Backed by a Google Fac­ulty Research Award, Smith is cur­rently studying how lan­guages have changed over the last sev­eral hun­dred years. But he’s doing it in a way only recently made pos­sible through tech­no­log­ical devel­op­ments in the dig­ital human­i­ties and nat­ural lan­guage pro­cessing. In the last few decades, libraries have been working to dig­i­tize lit­er­a­ture. Now that mil­lions of books are avail­able as search­able files, researchers are able to ask ques­tions that couldn’t be asked before.

Smith and his team will use cor­pora like the Penn Tree­bank, which includes the syn­tactic analyses of 30,000 sen­tences from The Wall Street Journal, to build sta­tis­tical models that auto­mat­i­cally detect the syntax of a sen­tence in a dig­i­tized book.

See: Northeastern

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