An n-gram is a group of characters or words that are put together in a certain way. It's kind of like a puzzle where you take pieces and fit them together to make a bigger picture.
Imagine you have a bunch of letters and you want to create some words. You might start with the letters "c-a-t" and make the word "cat."
Now, let's say you want to make bigger words or even sentences. You can use n-grams to do this. Let's say you have the sentence "The cat sat on the mat." You could break this sentence down into n-grams of varying lengths. For example, you could choose a bi-gram, which is a group of two words. This would give you the following n-grams:
- The cat
- cat sat
- sat on
- on the
- the mat
You could also choose a tri-gram, which is a group of three words. This would give you the following n-grams:
- The cat sat
- cat sat on
- sat on the
- on the mat
By breaking the sentence down into n-grams, you can analyze the relationships between words and gain insights into how language is structured. This can be helpful in fields like linguistics, natural language processing, and machine learning.