This technique of visualizing a language model by sampling was first suggested very early on by Shannon (1951) and Miller and Selfridge (1950) It's simplest to visualize how this works for the unigram case. Imagine all the words of the English language covering the probability space between 0 and 1, each word covering an interval proportional to its frequency. Fig. 3 .3 shows a visualization, using a unigram LM computed from the text of this book. We choose a random value between 0 and 1, find that point on the probability line, and print the word whose interval includes this chosen value. We continue choosing random numbers and generating words until we randomly generate the sentence-final token </s>.