Adaptive language modeling using minimum discriminant estimation

Abstract

We present an algorithm to adapt a n-gram language model to a document as it is dictated. The observed partial document is used to estimate a unigram distribution for the words that already occurred. Then, we find the closest ngram distribution to the static n-gram distribution (using the discrimination information distance measure) and that satisfies the marginal constraints derived from the document. The resulting minimum discrimination information model results in a perplexity of 208 instead of 290 for the static trigram model on a document of 321 words.