 However, the more sophisticated smoothing models were typically not derived in this fashion, but instead through independent considerations.In the field of computational linguistics, in particular language modeling, skip-grams are a generalization of "n"-grams in which the components (typically words) need not be consecutive in the text under consideration, but may leave gaps that are "skipped" over.They provide one way of overcoming the data sparsity problem found with conventional "n"-gram analysis.