When I'm conflicted about different phrasings of things (for instance, if there is a hyphen or there isn't on when writing compound words), I usually just use a

When I'm conflicted about different phrasings of things (for instance, if there is a hyphen or there isn't on when writing compound words), I usually just use a google search and go with whatever result has the most number of hits. That could be a suitable enough proxy for your use-case, and perhaps you could just use the google search service as an API... Of course, the RIGHT way to do this would be to use the n-gram datasets that people here have suggested :-)