An early experiment in language modeling involved a human subject guessing the next letter in a sentence, given the preceding letters. The experimenter recorded how many guesses were needed for each letter. What fundamental principle about language was this experiment designed to investigate?

The Significance of Predictability in Language

An early experiment designed to estimate the predictability of a language involved a human subject guessing the next letter in a text, given the preceding letters. The number of guesses needed for each letter was recorded. What was the primary goal of measuring the number of guesses?

N-gram Language Modeling