  We present a novel family of language model (LM) estimation techniques named
Sparse Non-negative Matrix (SNM) estimation. A first set of experiments
empirically evaluating it on the One Billion Word Benchmark shows that SNM
$n$-gram LMs perform almost as well as the well-established Kneser-Ney (KN)
models. When using skip-gram features the models are able to match the
state-of-the-art recurrent neural network (RNN) LMs; combining the two modeling
techniques yields the best known result on the benchmark. The computational
advantages of SNM over both maximum entropy and RNN LM estimation are probably
its main strength, promising an approach that has the same flexibility in
combining arbitrary features effectively and yet should scale to very large
amounts of data as gracefully as $n$-gram LMs do.
