wild cards

[Dmitriy Dligach]

Hello,

I am new to language modeling and to SRILM so I appologize if this 
question has already been discussed here:

SRILM can compute the probability of a string such as "a b c d e". I was 
wondering if there is a way to compute the probability of a string where 
one of the words is a wildcard. E.g., suppose I want to compute the 
probability of "a b * d e" where "*" is any word.

I believe this probability P(a, b, *, d, e) can be approximated as
P(a, b) * P(d, e), but I am still wondering whether there is a better way 
to compute it (e.g. by passing the wildcard to SRILM).

I need it to compute a conditional probability (e.g. P(c | a, b, d, e)).

Thank you!

Dmitriy