A '''language model''' is a [[Model#Conceptual model|model]] of the human brain's ability to produce [[natural language]].<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Blank |first1=Idan A. |title=What are large language models supposed to model? |journal=Trends in Cognitive Sciences |date=November 2023 |volume=27 |issue=11 |pages=987–989 |doi=10.1016/j.tics.2023.08.006|pmid=37659920 |doi-access=free }}"LLMs are supposed to model how utterances behave." </ref><ref>{{cite book |last1=Jurafsky |first1=Dan |last2=Martin |first2=James H. |title=Speech and Language Processing |date=2021 |edition=3rd |url=https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/ |access-date=24 May 2022 |chapter=N-gram Language Models |chapter-url= https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/3.pdf |archive-date=22 May 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220522005855/https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/ |url-status=live }}</ref>. Language models are useful for a variety of tasks, including [[speech recognition]],<ref>Kuhn, Roland, and Renato De Mori (1990). [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Roland_Kuhn2/publication/3191800_Cache-based_natural_language_model_for_speech_recognition/links/004635184ee5b2c24f000000.pdf "A cache-based natural language model for speech recognition"]. ''IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence'' 12.6: 570–583.</ref> [[machine translation]],<ref name="Semantic parsing as machine translation">Andreas, Jacob, Andreas Vlachos, and Stephen Clark (2013). [https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P13-2009 "Semantic parsing as machine translation"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200815080932/https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P13-2009/ |date=15 August 2020 }}. Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers).</ref> [[natural language generation]] (generating more human-like text), [[optical character recognition]], [[route optimization]],<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Liu |first1=Yang |last2=Wu |first2=Fanyou |last3=Liu |first3=Zhiyuan |last4=Wang |first4=Kai |last5=Wang |first5=Feiyue |last6=Qu |first6=Xiaobo |title=Can language models be used for real-world urban-delivery route optimization? |journal=The Innovation |date=2023 |volume=4 |issue=6 |pages=100520 |doi=10.1016/j.xinn.2023.100520 |doi-access=free|pmid=37869471 |pmc=10587631 |bibcode=2023Innov...400520L }}</ref> [[handwriting recognition]],<ref>Pham, Vu, et al (2014). [https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.4569 "Dropout improves recurrent neural networks for handwriting recognition"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201111170554/https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.4569 |date=11 November 2020 }}. 14th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition. IEEE.</ref> [[grammar induction]],<ref>Htut, Phu Mon, Kyunghyun Cho, and Samuel R. Bowman (2018). [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.10000.pdf?source=post_page--------------------------- "Grammar induction with neural language models: An unusual replication"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220814010528/https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.10000.pdf?source=post_page--------------------------- |date=14 August 2022 }}. {{arXiv|1808.10000}}.</ref> and [[information retrieval]].<ref name="ponte1998">{{cite conference |first1=Jay M. |last1=Ponte |first2= W. Bruce |last2=Croft | title= A language modeling approach to information retrieval |conference=Proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGIR Conference |year=1998 |publisher=ACM |place=Melbourne, Australia | pages = 275–281| doi=10.1145/290941.291008}}</ref><ref name="hiemstra1998">{{cite conference | first=Djoerd | last=Hiemstra | year = 1998 | title = A linguistically motivated probabilistically model of information retrieval | conference = Proceedings of the 2nd European conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries | publisher = LNCS, Springer | pages=569–584 | doi= 10.1007/3-540-49653-X_34}}</ref>
[[Large language model]]s (LLMs), currently their most advanced form, are predominantly based on [[Transformer (machine learning)|transformers]] trained on larger datasets (frequently using words [[Web scraping|scraped]] from the public [[internet]]). They have superseded [[recurrent neural network]]-based models, which had previously superseded the purely statistical models, such as [[Word n-gram language model|word ''n''-gram language model]].
