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Variable Word Rate N-grams

Yoshihiko Gotoh·Steve Renals
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Abstract

The rate of occurrence of words is not uniform but varies from document to document. Despite this observation, parameters for conventional n-gram language models are usually derived using the assumption of a constant word rate. In this paper we investigate the use of variable word rate assumption, modelled by a Poisson distribution or a continuous mixture of Poissons. We present an approach to estimating the relative frequencies of words or n-grams taking prior information of their occurrences into account. Discounting and smoothing schemes are also considered. Using the Broadcast News task, the approach demonstrates a reduction of perplexity up to 10%.

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Yoshihiko Gotoh, Steve Renals. 2000-03-29. Variable Word Rate N-grams. https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0003081

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