How do we estimate these bigram or n-gram probabilities? An intuitive way to estimate probabilities is called maximum likelihood estimation or MLE. We get maximum likelihood estimation the MLE estimate for the parameters of an n-gram model by getting counts from a corpus, and normalizing the counts so that they lie between 0 and 1. 1 normalize For example, to compute a particular bigram probability of a word y given a previous word x, we'll compute the count of the bigram C(xy) and normalize by the sum of all the bigrams that share the same first word x: