It is possible to evaluate how good an N-gram model is without integrating it into an automatic speech recognition. We simply measure how well it predicts some unseen test data.
Jurafsky & Martin – Section 4.3 – Training and Test Sets
As we should already know: in machine learning it is essential to evaluate a model on data that it was not learned from.
Jurafsky & Martin – Section 4.2 – Simple (Unsmoothed) N-Grams
We can just use raw counts to estimate probabilities directly.
Jurafsky & Martin – Section 4.1 – Word Counting in Corpora
The frequency of occurrence of each N-gram in a training corpus is used to estimate its probability.
Jurafsky & Martin – Section 9.6 – Search and Decoding
Important material on efficiently computing the combined likelihood of the acoustic model multiplied by the probability of the language model.
Jurafsky & Martin – Section 9.8 – Evaluation
In connected speech, three types of error are possible: substitutions, insertions, or deletions of words. It is usual to combine them into a single measure: Word Error Rate.
Jurafsky & Martin – Section 9.7 – Embedded training
Embedded training means that the data are transcribed, but that we don’t know the time alignment at the model or state levels.
Jurafsky & Martin – Section 9.5 – The lexicon and language model
Simply mentions the lexicon and language model and refers the reader to other chapters.