Abstract

In this paper the main differences between language modelling of Russian and English are examined. A Russian corpus and a comparable English corpus are described. The effects of high inflectionality in Russian and the relationship between the outof -vocabulary rate and vocabulary size are investigated. Standard word and class N-gram language modelling techniques are applied to the two corpora and perplexity results are reported. A novel approach to the modelling of inflected languages is proposed and its efficacy compared with the other techniques. 1. INTRODUCTION Much work has been conducted in recent years on language modelling techniques for speech recognition of English. In contrast, less commercially attractive yet widely spoken languages like Russian have received comparatively little attention in the literature (the first reported large-vocabulary recogniser for Russian appeared only recently[3]). Moreover, there are important difficulties with modelling Russian which are also...

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