Statistically improbable phrase means that some words appear together in a sentence that is very unlikely to happen by chance. It's like when you play a game and you roll the dice, and instead of getting a normal number, like four or five, you get a really weird number, like ten thousand. That's what statistically improbable phrase means, but with words. When people write a lot of books, computers look for these weird sentences, called statistically improbable phrases, and can help tell us when something special or different is happening.