Abstract

Building probabilistic models of language is a central task in natural language and speech processing allowing to integrate the syntactic and/or semantic (and recently pragmatic) constraints of the language into the systems. Probabilistic language models are an attractive alternative to the more traditional rule-based systems, such as context free grammars, because of the recent availability of massive amount of text corpora which can be used to e#ciently train the models and because instead of binary grammaticality judgement o#ered by the rule-based systems, likelihood of any sequence of lexical units can be obtained, which is a crucial factor in such tasks as speech recognition. Probabilistic language models also find their application in part-of-speech tagging, machine translation, semantic disambiguation and numerous other fields.

Citations