Applications of n ‐grams in textual information systems

This paper provides an introduction to the use of n ‐grams in textual information systems, where an n‐gram is a string of n , usually adjacent, characters extracted from a section of continuous text. Applications that can be implemented efficiently and effectively using sets of n ‐grams include spelling error detection and correction, query expansion, information retrieval with serial, inverted and signature files, dictionary look‐up, text compression, and language identification.