Chapter 2. Statistical Language Modeling
Computational linguistics is an emerging field that is widely used in analytics, software applications, and contexts where people communicate with machines. Computational linguistics may be defined as a subfield of artificial intelligence. Applications of computational linguistics include machine translation, speech recognition, intelligent Web searching, information retrieval, and intelligent spelling checkers. It is important to understand the preprocessing tasks or the computations that can be performed on natural language text. In the following chapter, we will discuss ways to calculate word frequencies, the Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) model, interpolation on data, and so on. But first, let's go through the various topics that we will cover in this chapter. They are as follows:
- Calculating word frequencies (1-gram, 2-gram, 3-gram)
- Developing MLE for a given text
- Applying smoothing on the MLE model
- Developing a back-off mechanism...
