A statisticallanguage model, or more simply a language model, is a prob- abilistic mechanism for generating text. Such adefinition is general enough to include an endless variety of schemes. However, a distinction should be made between generative models, which can in principle be used to synthesize artificial text, and discriminative techniques to classify text into predefined cat- egories. The first statisticallanguage modeler was Claude Shannon. In exploring the application of his newly founded theory of information to human language, Shannon considered language as a statistical source,...