title: Extracting Frequency Data from Sorted List of Phrases
body: <p>After plumbing the documentation/past questions on list operations, I've come up blank - many of the cases involve numbers, whereas I'm working with large quantities of text.</p>
  
  <p>I have a sorted list of common three-word phrases (trigrams) that appear in a large body of textual information, generated through Mathematica's Partition[], Tally[], and Sort[] commands. An example of the sort of data that I'm operating on (I have hundreds of these files):</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>{{{wa, wa, wa}, 66}, {{i, love, you}, 62}, {{la, la, la}, 50}, {{meaning, of, life}, 42}, {on, come, on}, 40}, {{come, on, come}, 40}, {{yeah, yeah, yeah}, 38}, {{no, no, no}, 36}, {{we, re, gonna}, 36}, {{you, love, me}, 35}, {{in, love, with}, 32}, {{the, way, you}, 30}, {{i, want, to}, 30}, {{back, to, me}, 29}, &lt;&lt;38211>>, {{of, an, xke}, 1}}</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>I'm hoping to search this file so that if the input is "meaning, of, life" it will return "42." I feel like I must be overlooking something obvious but after tinkering around I've hit a brick wall here. Mathematica is number heavy in its documentation, which is.. well, unsurprising.</p>