[delluminatus]

I learned about n-grams in a natural language processing class in uni.

A related (but more interesting, imho) concept is the Hidden Markov Model, which is used for things like part-of-speech tagging and areas of speech recognition. It takes a sequence of "observations", like sound vectors or words, and uses a probabilisitic model to match them with "hidden states", like phonemes or parts of speech.

I got a job with a part-of-speech tagging website I made as a pet project for that class :)