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Re: Warning message

From: Andreas Stolcke <stolcke at ADDRESS HIDDEN>
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2006 21:49:43 PDT

In message <20060919160016.52311.qmail at ADDRESS HIDDEN>you wrote:
> --0-789738089-1158681616=:50607
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
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> I am developing language models of different order (2 to 5) with Good-Turing
> discounting and Katz backoff for Smoothing.  I all cases, I have got the foll
> owing warning message:
>     discount coeff 1 is out of range : 6.2135e-17
>
> I could not get the reason for the warning message. I develop language models
>  5 days ago using the same data and smoothing techniques, but this warning  m
> essage was no there.

Something must have changed.  What was it?  Has the software been updated?

>
> Could you please tell me the reason behind? Does it affect the quality of my
> language models?

The warning is issued because discount coefficients (the factors by which
the maximum likelihood estimates are reduced) should be between 0 and 1.
The value you are getting is effectively zero.  It indicates an
anomaly (non-smoothness) in the count-of-count of your data.

--Andreas

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