The standard methods for inferring the parameters of probabilistic models in computational linguistics are based on the principle of maximum-likelihood estimation; for example, the parameters of Probabilistic Context-Free Grammars (PCFGs) are typically estimated from strings of terminals using the Inside-Outside (IO) algorithm, an instance of the Expectation Maximization (EM) procedure (Lari and Young, 1990).
much recent work in machine learning and statistics has turned away from maximum-likelihood in favor of Bayesian methods, and there is increasing interest in Bayesian methods in computational linguistics as well (Finkel et al., 2006).