How to Make Neural Language Models Practical for Speech Recognition : Alexa Blogs

An automatic-speech-recognition system -- such as Alexa's -- converts speech into text, and one of its key components is its language model. Given a sequence of words, the language model computes the probability that any given word is the next one. For instance, a language model would predict that a sentence that begins "Toni Morrison won the Nobel" is more likely to conclude "Prize" than "dries". Language models can thus help decide between competing interpretations of the same acoustic information. Conventional language models are n-gram based, meaning that they model the probability of the next word given the past n-1 words.