Neural net language models - Scholarpedia

A language model is a function, or an algorithm for learning such a function, that captures the salient statistical characteristics of the distribution of sequences of words in a natural language, typically allowing one to make probabilistic predictions of the next word given preceding ones. A neural network language model is a language model based on Neural Networks, exploiting their ability to learn distributed representations to reduce the impact of the curse of dimensionality. In the context of learning algorithms, the curse of dimensionality refers to the need for huge numbers of training examples when learning highly complex functions. When the number of input variables increases, the number of required examples can grow exponentially. The curse of dimensionality arises when a huge number of different combinations of values of the input variables must be discriminated from each other, and the learning algorithm needs at least one example per relevant combination of values.