Language

Modeling
Introduction to N-grams
Dan Jurafsky

Probabilistic Language Models

• Today’s goal: assign a probability to a sentence
• Machine Translation:
• P(high winds tonite) > P(large winds tonite)
• Spell Correction
Why? • The office is about fifteen minuets from my house
• P(about fifteen minutes from) > P(about fifteen minuets from)
• Speech Recognition
• P(I saw a van) >> P(eyes awe of an)
• + Summarization, question-answering, etc., etc.!!
Dan Jurafsky

Probabilistic Language Modeling

• Goal: compute the probability of a sentence or
sequence of words:
P(W) = P(w1,w2,w3,w4,w5…wn)
• Related task: probability of an upcoming word:
P(w5|w1,w2,w3,w4)
• A model that computes either of these:
P(W) or P(wn|w1,w2…wn-1) is called a language model.
• Better: the grammar But language model or LM is standard
Dan Jurafsky

How to compute P(W)

• How to compute this joint probability:

• P(its, water, is, so, transparent, that)

• Intuition: let’s rely on the Chain Rule of Probability

Dan Jurafsky

Reminder: The Chain Rule

• Recall the definition of conditional probabilities
p(B|A) = P(A,B)/P(A) Rewriting: P(A,B) = P(A)P(B|A)

• More variables:
P(A,B,C,D) = P(A)P(B|A)P(C|A,B)P(D|A,B,C)
• The Chain Rule in General
P(x1,x2,x3,…,xn) = P(x1)P(x2|x1)P(x3|x1,x2)…P(xn|x1,…,xn-1)
 The Chain Rule applied to compute
Dan Jurafsky

joint probability of words in sentence

P(“its water is so transparent”) =

P(its) × P(water|its) × P(is|its water)
× P(so|its water is) × P(transparent|its water is so)
Dan Jurafsky

How to estimate these probabilities

• Could we just count and divide?

• No! Too many possible sentences!

• We’ll never see enough data for estimating these
Dan Jurafsky

Markov Assumption

• Simplifying assumption:
Andrei Markov

• Or maybe
Dan Jurafsky

Markov Assumption

• In other words, we approximate each

component in the product
Dan Jurafsky

Simplest case: Unigram model

Some automatically generated sentences from a unigram model

fifth, an, of, futures, the, an, incorporated, a, a, the, inflation, most, dollars,
quarter, in, is, mass

thrift, did, eighty, said, hard, 'm, july, bullish

that, or, limited, the

Dan Jurafsky

Bigram model
Condition on the previous word:

texaco, rose, one, in, this, issue, is, pursuing, growth, in, a, boiler, house, said, mr., gurria,
mexico, 's, motion, control, proposal, without, permission, from, five, hundred, fifty, five,
yen

outside, new, car, parking, lot, of, the, agreement, reached

this, would, be, a, record, november

Dan Jurafsky

N-gram models
• We can extend to trigrams, 4-grams, 5-grams
• In general this is an insufficient model of language
• because language has long-distance dependencies:
“The computer which I had just put into the machine room on
the fifth floor crashed.”
• But we can often get away with N-gram models
 Language
Modeling
Introduction to N-grams
 Language
Modeling
Estimating N-gram
Probabilities
Dan Jurafsky

Estimating bigram probabilities

• The Maximum Likelihood Estimate
Dan Jurafsky

An example

<s> I am Sam </s>

<s> Sam I am </s>
<s> I do not like green eggs and ham </s>
Dan Jurafsky

More examples:
Berkeley Restaurant Project sentences

• can you tell me about any good cantonese restaurants close by

• mid priced thai food is what i’m looking for
• tell me about chez panisse
• can you give me a listing of the kinds of food that are available
• i’m looking for a good place to eat breakfast
• when is caffe venezia open during the day
Dan Jurafsky

Raw bigram counts

• Out of 9222 sentences
Dan Jurafsky

Raw bigram probabilities

• Normalize by unigrams:

• Result:
Dan Jurafsky

Bigram estimates of sentence probabilities

P(<s> I want english food </s>) =
P(I|<s>)
× P(want|I)
× P(english|want)
× P(food|english)
× P(</s>|food)
= .000031
Dan Jurafsky

What kinds of knowledge?

• P(english|want) = .0011
• P(chinese|want) = .0065
• P(to|want) = .66
• P(eat | to) = .28
• P(food | to) = 0
• P(want | spend) = 0
• P (i | <s>) = .25
Dan Jurafsky

Practical Issues
• We do everything in log space
• Avoid underflow
• (also adding is faster than multiplying)
Dan Jurafsky

Language Modeling Toolkits

• SRILM
• http://www.speech.sri.com/projects/srilm/
• KenLM
• https://kheafield.com/code/kenlm/
Dan Jurafsky

Google N-Gram Release, August 2006

…
Dan Jurafsky

Google N-Gram Release

• serve as the incoming 92
• serve as the incubator 99
• serve as the independent 794
• serve as the index 223
• serve as the indication 72
• serve as the indicator 120
• serve as the indicators 45
• serve as the indispensable 111
• serve as the indispensible 40
• serve as the individual 234

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/08/all-our-n-gram-are-belong-to-you.html
Dan Jurafsky

Google Book N-grams

• http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/
 Language
Modeling
Estimating N-gram
Probabilities
Language
Modeling
Evaluation and
Perplexity
Dan Jurafsky

Evaluation: How good is our model?

• Does our language model prefer good sentences to bad ones?
• Assign higher probability to “real” or “frequently observed” sentences
• Than “ungrammatical” or “rarely observed” sentences?
• We train parameters of our model on a training set.
• We test the model’s performance on data we haven’t seen.
• A test set is an unseen dataset that is different from our training set,
totally unused.
• An evaluation metric tells us how well our model does on the test set.
Dan Jurafsky

(Extra Slide not in video)

Training on the test set
• We can’t allow test sentences into the training set
• We will assign it an artificially high probability when we set it in
the test set
• “Training on the test set”
• Bad science!
• And violates the honor code

30
Dan Jurafsky

Extrinsic evaluation of N-gram models

• Best evaluation for comparing models A and B
• Put each model in a task
• spelling corrector, speech recognizer, MT system
• Run the task, get an accuracy for A and for B
• How many misspelled words corrected properly
• How many words translated correctly
• Compare accuracy for A and B
Dan Jurafsky

Difficulty of extrinsic (in-vivo) evaluation of

N-gram models
• Extrinsic evaluation
• Time-consuming; can take days or weeks
• So
• Sometimes use intrinsic evaluation: perplexity
• Bad approximation
• unless the test data looks just like the training data
• So generally only useful in pilot experiments
• But is helpful to think about.
Dan Jurafsky

Intuition of Perplexity
mushrooms 0.1
• The Shannon Game:
• How well can we predict the next word? pepperoni 0.1
anchovies 0.01
I always order pizza with cheese and ____ ….
The 33rd President of the US was ____ fried rice 0.0001
I saw a ____ ….
• Unigrams are terrible at this game. (Why?) and 1e-100
• A better model of a text
• is one which assigns a higher probability to the word that actually occurs
Dan Jurafsky

Perplexity
The best language model is one that best predicts an unseen test set
• Gives the highest P(sentence)
Perplexity is the inverse probability of
the test set, normalized by the number
of words:

Chain rule:

For bigrams:

Minimizing perplexity is the same as maximizing probability

Dan Jurafsky

The Shannon Game intuition for perplexity

• From Josh Goodman
• How hard is the task of recognizing digits ‘0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9’
• Perplexity 10
• How hard is recognizing (30,000) names at Microsoft.
• Perplexity = 30,000
• If a system has to recognize
• Operator (1 in 4)
• Sales (1 in 4)
• Technical Support (1 in 4)
• 30,000 names (1 in 120,000 each)
• Perplexity is 52.6
• Perplexity is weighted equivalent branching factor
 The Shannon Game intuition for perplexity
A call-routing phone system gets 120K calls and has to recognize
◦ "Operator" (let's say this occurs 1 in 4 calls)
◦ "Sales" (1 in 4)
◦ "Technical Support" (1 in 4)
◦ 30,000 different names (each name occurring 1 time in the 120K calls)

To get the perplexity of this sequence of length 120K:

1) multiply 120K probabilities (90K of which are 1/4 and 30K of
which are 1/120K)
2) take the inverse 120,000th root:
Perp = (¼ * ¼ * ¼* ¼ * ¼ * …. * 1/120K * 1/120K * ….)^(-1/120K)
Can be arithmetically simplified to just N = 4: operator (1/4), sales
(1/4), tech support (1/4), and 30,000 names (1/120,000):
Dan Jurafsky

Perplexity as branching factor

• Let’s suppose a sentence consisting of random digits
• What is the perplexity of this sentence according to a model that
assign P=1/10 to each digit?
Dan Jurafsky

Lower perplexity = better model

• Training 38 million words, test 1.5 million words, WSJ

N-gram Unigram Bigram Trigram

Order
Perplexity 962 170 109
Language
Modeling
Evaluation and
Perplexity
 Language
Modeling
Generalization and zeros
Dan Jurafsky

The Shannon Visualization Method

• Choose a random bigram
<s> I
(<s>, w) according to its probability I want
• Now choose a random bigram want to
(w, x) according to its probability to eat
• And so on until we choose </s> eat Chinese
• Then string the words together Chinese food
food </s>
I want to eat Chinese food
Dan Jurafsky

Approximating Shakespeare
Dan Jurafsky

Shakespeare as corpus
• N=884,647 tokens, V=29,066
• Shakespeare produced 300,000 bigram types
out of V2= 844 million possible bigrams.
• So 99.96% of the possible bigrams were never seen
(have zero entries in the table)
• Quadrigrams worse: What's coming out looks
like Shakespeare because it is Shakespeare
Dan Jurafsky

The wall street journal is not shakespeare

(no offense)
Dan Jurafsky

Can you guess the author of these random

3-gram sentences?
• They also point to ninety nine point six billion dollars from two
hundred four oh six three percent of the rates of interest stores
as Mexico and gram Brazil on market conditions
• This shall forbid it should be branded, if renown made it empty.
• “You are uniformly charming!” cried he, with a smile of
associating and now and then I bowed and they perceived a
chaise and four to wish for.

45
Dan Jurafsky

The perils of overfitting

• N-grams only work well for word prediction if the test
corpus looks like the training corpus
• In real life, it often doesn’t
• We need to train robust models that generalize!
• One kind of generalization: Zeros!
• Things that don’t ever occur in the training set
• But occur in the test set
 Dan Jurafsky

Zeros
• Training set: • Test set
… denied the allegations … denied the offer
… denied the reports … denied the loan
… denied the claims
… denied the request

P(“offer” | denied the) = 0

Dan Jurafsky

Zero probability bigrams

• Bigrams with zero probability
• mean that we will assign 0 probability to the test set!
• And hence we cannot compute perplexity (can’t divide by 0)!
 Language
Modeling
Generalization and zeros
 Language
Modeling
Smoothing: Add-one
(Laplace) smoothing
 Dan Jurafsky

The intuition of smoothing (from Dan Klein)

• When we have sparse statistics:
P(w | denied the)

allegations
3 allegations

outcome
2 reports

reports

attack
1 claims
…

claims

request

man
1 request
7 total
• Steal probability mass to generalize better
P(w | denied the)
2.5 allegations

allegations
1.5 reports

allegations

outcome
0.5 claims

attack
reports
0.5 request
…

man
claims

request
2 other
7 total
Dan Jurafsky

Add-one estimation

• Also called Laplace smoothing

• Pretend we saw each word one more time than we did
• Just add one to all the counts!

• MLE estimate:

• Add-1 estimate:
Dan Jurafsky

Maximum Likelihood Estimates

• The maximum likelihood estimate
• of some parameter of a model M from a training set T
• maximizes the likelihood of the training set T given the model M
• Suppose the word “bagel” occurs 400 times in a corpus of a million words
• What is the probability that a random word from some other text will be
“bagel”?
• MLE estimate is 400/1,000,000 = .0004
• This may be a bad estimate for some other corpus
• But it is the estimate that makes it most likely that “bagel” will occur 400 times in
a million word corpus.
Dan Jurafsky

Berkeley Restaurant Corpus: Laplace

smoothed bigram counts
Dan Jurafsky

Laplace-smoothed bigrams
Dan Jurafsky

Reconstituted counts
Dan Jurafsky

Compare with raw bigram counts

Dan Jurafsky

Add-1 estimation is a blunt instrument

• So add-1 isn’t used for N-grams:
• We’ll see better methods
• But add-1 is used to smooth other NLP models
• For text classification
• In domains where the number of zeros isn’t so huge.
 Language
Modeling
Smoothing: Add-one
(Laplace) smoothing
 Language
Modeling
Interpolation, Backoff,
and Web-Scale LMs
Dan Jurafsky

Backoff and Interpolation

• Sometimes it helps to use less context
• Condition on less context for contexts you haven’t learned much about
• Backoff:
• use trigram if you have good evidence,
• otherwise bigram, otherwise unigram
• Interpolation:
• mix unigram, bigram, trigram

• Interpolation works better

Dan Jurafsky

Linear Interpolation
• Simple interpolation

• Lambdas conditional on context:

Dan Jurafsky

How to set the lambdas?

• Use a held-out corpus
Held-Out Test
Training Data Data Data
• Choose λs to maximize the probability of held-out data:
• Fix the N-gram probabilities (on the training data)
• Then search for λs that give largest probability to held-out set:
Dan Jurafsky

Unknown words: Open versus closed

vocabulary tasks
• If we know all the words in advanced
• Vocabulary V is fixed
• Closed vocabulary task
• Often we don’t know this
• Out Of Vocabulary = OOV words
• Open vocabulary task
• Instead: create an unknown word token <UNK>
• Training of <UNK> probabilities
• Create a fixed lexicon L of size V
• At text normalization phase, any training word not in L changed to <UNK>
• Now we train its probabilities like a normal word
• At decoding time
• If text input: Use UNK probabilities for any word not in training
Dan Jurafsky

Huge web-scale n-grams

• How to deal with, e.g., Google N-gram corpus
• Pruning
• Only store N-grams with count > threshold.
• Remove singletons of higher-order n-grams
• Entropy-based pruning
• Efficiency
• Efficient data structures like tries
• Bloom filters: approximate language models
• Store words as indexes, not strings
• Use Huffman coding to fit large numbers of words into two bytes
• Quantize probabilities (4-8 bits instead of 8-byte float)
Dan Jurafsky

Smoothing for Web-scale N-grams

• “Stupid backoff” (Brants et al. 2007)
• No discounting, just use relative frequencies

66
Dan Jurafsky

N-gram Smoothing Summary

• Add-1 smoothing:
• OK for text categorization, not for language modeling
• The most commonly used method:
• Extended Interpolated Kneser-Ney
• For very large N-grams like the Web:
• Stupid backoff

67
Dan Jurafsky

Advanced Language Modeling

• Discriminative models:
• choose n-gram weights to improve a task, not to fit the
training set
• Parsing-based models
• Caching Models
• Recently used words are more likely to appear

• These perform very poorly for speech recognition (why?)

 Language
Modeling
Interpolation, Backoff,
and Web-Scale LMs