This chapter reviews research and applications in statistical language modeling for information retrieval (IR), which has emerged within the past several years as a new probabilistic framework for describing information retrieval processes. Generally speaking, statistical language modeling, or more simply language modeling (LM), involves estimating a probability distribution that captures statistical regularities of natural language use. Applied to information retrieval, language modeling refers to the problem of estimating the likelihood that a query and a document could have been generated by the same language model, given the language model of the document either with or without a language model of the query.
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