As part of an independent research project in natural language processing, I implemented a modified, interpolated Kneser-Ney smoothing algorithm. Looking online, I could not find a Kneser-Ney smoothing algorithm that met my exact needs, so I created my own.

1. It has a correction for out-of-vocabulary words, necessary for scoring probabilities for unseen n-grams
2. It estimates discount values based on training data instead of setting them to a fixed value of the typically used .75
3. It is super easy to use

# let corpus represent a large string of training data
# let sentence represent a string that you wish to score

kn = ModifiedKneserNey()
kn.train(corpus)
kn.log_score_per_ngram(sentence)

# Done!:)

• Python 3, including:
  • nltk
  • numpy

• Stanley F. Chen, Joshua Goodman (1999), ”An empirical study of smoothing techniques for language modeling,” in Computer Speech and Language, vol. 13, Issue 4, pp. 359-394.

• P. Taraba (2007), ”Kneser-Ney Smoothing With a Correcting Transformation for Small Data Sets,” in IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, vol. 15, no. 6, pp. 1912-1921.

• Heafield, Kenneth and Pouzyrevsky, Ivan and H Clark, Jonathan and Koehn, Philipp. (2013). ”Scalable Modified Kneser-Ney Language Model Estimation” in Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistic, vol. 2, pp. 690-696.

• Kneser, Reinhard and Hermann Ney (1995), ”Improved backing-off for M-gram language modeling.” ICASSP. D. Jurafsky and J. H. Martin (2017), ”Speech and Language Processing,” (Third Edition draft)