Statistical Modelling of Highly Inflective Languages

Abstract

A language model is a description of language. Although grammar has been the prevalent tool in modelling language for a long time, interest has recently shifted towards statistical modelling. This chapter refers to speech recognition experiments, although statistical language models are applicable over a wide-range of applications: machine translation, information retrieval, etc. Statistical modelling attempts to estimate the frequency of word sequences. If a sequence of words is s = w1w2...wk, the probability can be expressed as: