Language model

A statistical language model is a probability distribution over sequences of words. Given such a sequence, say of length m, it assigns a probability to the whole sequence. Having a way to estimate the relative likelihood of different phrases is useful in many natural language processing applications. Language modeling is used in speech recognition, machine translation, part-of-speech tagging, parsing, handwriting recognition, information retrieval and other applications.

In speech recognition, the computer tries to match sounds with word sequences. The language model provides context to distinguish between words and phrases that sound similar. For example, in American English, the phrases "recognize speech" and "wreck a nice beach" are pronounced almost the same but mean very different things. These ambiguities are easier to resolve when evidence from the language model is incorporated with the pronunciation model and the acoustic model.

Language models are used in information retrieval in the query likelihood model. Here a separate language model is associated with each document in a collection. Documents are ranked based on the probability of the query Q in the document's language model . Commonly, the unigram language model is used for this purpose—otherwise known as the bag of words model.