为印地语和马拉地语设计了基于词形的分词方法,提升语言模型性能。
MorphTok: Morphologically Grounded Tokenization for Indian Languages
- 先进行词形感知分词,再用BPE,更符合语言学单位。
- 新方法使机器翻译和语言建模性能提升,肥沃度分数降低1.68%。
- 针对印度文字中的依赖元音设计约束BPE,适合多语言模型研究者。
分词是自然语言处理中的关键步骤,尤其在大语言模型兴起的背景下,直接影响下游任务表现、计算成本与效率。现有大模型多采用贪心合并高频字符二元组的字节对编码(BPE)进行子词分词,常导致分割结果不符合语言学上有意义的单元。为此,我们提出在应用BPE前加入词形感知分词作为预处理步骤。为支持该方法,我们构建了首个包含沙尼拆分的印地语和马拉地语数据集。实验表明,基于词形的分词显著提升了机器翻译与语言建模性能。此外,针对印度语系中常见的依赖元音问题,我们提出约束式字节对编码(CBPE),通过引入书写系统特有规则,确保依赖元音与其关联字符形成整体,而非独立成词。结果显示,CBPE将肥沃度分数降低1.68%,同时保持或优于标准BPE的下游性能,且计算效率更高。为进一步评估分词效果,我们引入新的人工评价指标EvalTok,实现更贴近人类认知的评估。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Tokenization is a crucial step in NLP, especially with the rise of large language models (LLMs), impacting downstream performance, computational cost, and efficiency. Existing LLMs rely on the classical Byte-pair Encoding (BPE) algorithm for subword tokenization that greedily merges frequent character bigrams, often leading to segmentation that does not align with linguistically meaningful units. To address this, we propose morphology-aware segmentation as a pre-tokenization step before applying BPE. To facilitate morphology-aware segmentation, we create a novel dataset for Hindi and Marathi, incorporating sandhi splitting to enhance the subword tokenization. Experiments on downstream tasks show that morphologically grounded tokenization improves machine translation and language modeling performance. Additionally, to handle the dependent vowels common in syllable-based writing systems used by Indic languages, we propose Constrained BPE (CBPE), an extension to the standard BPE algorithm incorporating script-specific constraints. In particular, CBPE handles dependent vowels to form a cohesive unit with other characters instead of occurring as a single unit. Our results show that CBPE achieves a 1.68\% reduction in fertility scores while maintaining comparable or improved downstream performance in machine translation and language modeling, offering a computationally efficient alternative to standard BPE. Moreover, to evaluate segmentation across different tokenization algorithms, we introduce a new human evaluation metric, \textit{EvalTok}, enabling more human-grounded assessment.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。