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
Rewriting:
• 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)
Dan Jurafsky
The Chain Rule applied to compute
joint probability of words in sentence
P(w1w2 … wn ) = Õ P(wi | w1w2 … wi-1 )
i
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?
P(the | its water is so transparent that) =
Count(its water is so transparent that the)
Count(its water is so transparent that)
• No! Too many possible sentences!
• We’ll never see enough data for estimating these
Dan Jurafsky
Markov Assumption
• Simplifying assumption:
Andrei Markov
P(the | its water is so transparent that) » P(the | that)
• Or maybe
P(the | its water is so transparent that) » P(the | transparent that)
Dan Jurafsky
Markov Assumption
P(w1w2 … wn ) » Õ P(wi | wi-k … wi-1 )
i
• In other words, we approximate each
component in the product
P(wi | w1w2 … wi-1) » P(wi | wi-k … wi-1)
Dan Jurafsky
Simplest case: Unigram model
P(w1w2 … wn ) » Õ P(w i )
i
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:
P(wi | w1w2 … wi-1) » P(wi | wi-1)
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
Estimating N-gram
Probabilities
Dan Jurafsky
Estimating bigram probabilities
• The Maximum Likelihood Estimate
count(wi-1,wi )
P(wi | w i-1) =
count(w i-1 )
c(wi-1,wi )
P(wi | w i-1 ) =
c(wi-1)
Dan Jurafsky
An example
<s> I am Sam </s>
c(wi-1,wi )
P(wi | w i-1 ) = <s> Sam I am </s>
c(wi-1) <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
Dan Jurafsky
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Dan Jurafsky
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Dan Jurafsky
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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
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 ____ ….
• A better model of a text and 1e-100
• 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) -
1
PP(W ) = P(w1w2 ...wN ) N
Perplexity is the inverse probability of
the test set, normalized by the number
1
of words: = N
P(w1w2 ...wN )
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 53
• Perplexity is weighted equivalent branching factor
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
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
reports
2 reports
attack
…
request
claims
1 claims
man
1 request
7 total
• Steal probability mass to generalize better
P(w | denied the)
2.5 allegations
allegations
allegations
1.5 reports
outcome
0.5 claims
reports
attack
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!
c(wi-1, wi )
PMLE (wi | wi-1 ) =
• MLE estimate: c(wi-1 )
c(wi-1, wi ) +1
• Add-1 estimate: PAdd-1 (wi | wi-1 ) =
c(wi-1 ) +V
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.
