Add-one smoothing

Also written: Laplace smoothing

Adding 1 to every count before turning counts into chances, so nothing the model never saw gets a chance of exactly 0.

Other terms from the same lesson

• corpus: The collection of text a language model learns from, such as product descriptions or a slice of the web.
• language model: A model that predicts the next token from the ones before it.
• unigram: The simplest language model: it predicts each character or word from how common it is overall, ignoring what came before.