In other words, instead of P(w), which answers the question "How likely is w?", we'd like to create a unigram model that we might call P CONTINUATION , which answers the question "How likely is w to appear as a novel continuation?". How can we estimate this probability of seeing the word w as a novel continuation, in a new unseen context? The Kneser-Ney intuition is to base our estimate of P CONTINUATION on the number of different contexts word w has appeared in, that is, the number of bigram types it completes. Every bigram type was a novel continuation the first time it was seen. We hypothesize that words that have appeared in more contexts in the past are more likely to appear in some new context as well. The number of times a word w appears as a novel continuation can be expressed as: