A Comparison of Phrase Based and Word based Language Model for Punjabi

Abstract

A language model provides connection to the decoding process to determine a precise word from several available options in the information base or phrase table. The language model can be generated using n-gram approach. Various language models and smoothing procedures are there to determine this model, like unigram, bigram, trigram, interpolation, backoff language model etc. We have done some experiments with different language models where we have used phrases in place of words as the smallest unit. Experiments have shown that phrase based language model yield more accurate results as compared to simple word based mode. We have also done some experiments with machine translation system where we have used phrase based language model rather than word based model and system yield great improvement.