We can now turn c * i into a probability P * i by normalizing by N. A related way to view smoothing is as discounting (lowering) some non-zero discounting counts in order to get the probability mass that will be assigned to the zero counts. Thus, instead of referring to the discounted counts c * , we might describe a smoothing algorithm in terms of a relative discount d c , the ratio of the discounted counts to discount the original counts: