Language modeling
Language modeling is the task of computing the probability of a sequence of words. Language models are crucial to a lot of different applications, such as speech recognition, optical character recognition, machine translation, and spelling correction. For example, in American English, the two phrases wreck a nice beach and recognize speech are almost identical in pronunciation, but their respective meanings are completely different from each other. A good language model can distinguish which phrase is most likely to be correct, based on the context of the conversation. This section will provide an overview of word and character-level language models and how RNNs can be used to build them.
Word-based models
A word-based language model defines a probability distribution over sequences of words. Given a sequence of words of length m, it assigns a probability P(w1, ... , wm) to the full sequence of words. We can use these probabilities as follows:
- To estimate the likelihood of...