Intermediate · NLP

N-gram Model (for Text)

Visual diagram · (in preparation) · Math · (in preparation) · Worked example · 3 difficulty levels.

TL;DR. A statistical language model that predicts the next word in a sequence based on the preceding N-1 words.

Technical Definition

A statistical language model that predicts the next word in a sequence based on the preceding N-1 words.

How it works

N-gram models analyze sequences of words (N-grams) to understand common patterns and predict likely continuations. While more advanced models have surpassed them for complex tasks, they still form a basic building block for understanding word probabilities and are used in tasks like spell checking and simpler text generation. They count the frequency of word sequences.

Related Concepts

• Tokenization — The process of breaking text into smaller units (tokens) that language models can process as numerical inputs.
• Language model — A language model is a statistical tool used to predict the probability of a sequence of words occurring in a natural language.
• Natural language processing (NLP) — A field of AI enabling computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language.