arXiv:2505.16868cs.CL2025-05被引 3

对比三种分词法在印地语等印度语言中的表现,发现SentencePiece在多数场景更优。

Comparative analysis of subword tokenization approaches for Indian languages

  • 比较SentencePiece、BPE和WordPiece在印度语言上的分词效果
  • SentencePiece在统计与神经机器翻译中得分最高,尤其在印地语→英语任务中
  • 多语言模型下BPE表现更佳,印地语翻译优于英译印地语

分词是将文本拆分为机器可处理单元的关键步骤,对机器翻译尤为重要。子词分词通过将词语拆分为更小的子词单位,特别适用于形态复杂或词汇量大的语言。印度语言常具有黏着结构,由前缀、后缀和词干组合而成,需合适的分词策略。本文比较了SentencePiece、字节对编码(BPE)和WordPiece分词法在统计、神经及多语言神经机器翻译模型中的表现。采用BLEU、TER、METEOR、CHRF、RIBES和COMET等标准指标评估。结果表明,对于大多数语言对,在统计与神经机器翻译模型中,SentencePiece始终优于其他方法;而在多语言神经翻译模型中,BPE表现更优。尽管使用相同分词器和数据集,从印度语言到英语的翻译效果普遍优于反向翻译。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Tokenization is the act of breaking down text into smaller parts, or tokens, that are easier for machines to process. This is a key phase in machine translation (MT) models. Subword tokenization enhances this process by breaking down words into smaller subword units, which is especially beneficial in languages with complicated morphology or a vast vocabulary. It is useful in capturing the intricate structure of words in Indian languages (ILs), such as prefixes, suffixes, and other morphological variations. These languages frequently use agglutinative structures, in which words are formed by the combination of multiple morphemes such as suffixes, prefixes, and stems. As a result, a suitable tokenization strategy must be chosen to address these scenarios. This paper examines how different subword tokenization techniques, such as SentencePiece, Byte Pair Encoding (BPE), and WordPiece Tokenization, affect ILs. The effectiveness of these subword tokenization techniques is investigated in statistical, neural, and multilingual neural machine translation models. All models are examined using standard evaluation metrics, such as the Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) score, TER, METEOR, CHRF, RIBES, and COMET. Based on the results, it appears that for the majority of language pairs for the Statistical and Neural MT models, the SentencePiece tokenizer continuously performed better than other tokenizers in terms of BLEU score. However, BPE tokenization outperformed other tokenization techniques in the context of Multilingual Neural Machine Translation model. The results show that, despite using the same tokenizer and dataset for each model, translations from ILs to English surpassed translations from English to ILs.

分词机器翻译印度语言子词

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