通过并行分词器实现多语言共享语义空间,提升低资源语言跨语言迁移效果
Parallel Tokenizers: Rethinking Encoder Models' Vocabulary Design in Cross-Lingual Transfer of Low-Resource Languages
- 先单语训练分词器,再用双语词典对齐词汇表,构建跨语言共享语义空间
- 在13种低资源语言上预训练,各项任务性能均优于传统多语言模型
- 特别适合低资源语言的跨语言迁移,为多语言表示学习提供新范式
分词是多语言语言模型的基础,但现有方法常将语义相同的词映射到不同嵌入,阻碍跨语言迁移。例如,英语'I eat rice'与豪萨语'Ina cin shinkafa'通常被分配不同词汇索引,导致无法共享表示,限制跨语言泛化。这一问题在低资源语言中尤为严重,而共享表示本可带来最大收益。本文提出并行分词器框架:先单语训练分词器,再利用双语词典或逐词翻译对词汇表进行穷尽对齐,强制建立跨语言共享语义空间,同时自然改善词频平衡性。我们在13种低资源语言上从头预训练Transformer编码器,评估其在情感分析、仇恨言论检测、情绪分类和句子嵌入相似性任务上的表现。所有任务中,采用并行分词器的模型均优于传统多语言基线,证实重新思考分词设计对推进多语言表示学习至关重要,尤其在低资源场景下。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Tokenization forms the basis of multilingual language models, yet existing methods often limit cross-lingual transfer by mapping semantically equivalent words to different embeddings. For example, 'I eat rice' in English and 'Ina cin shinkafa' in Hausa are typically mapped to different vocabulary indices, preventing shared representations and limiting cross-lingual generalization. This problem is even more pronounced in low-resource languages, where shared representations could offer the greatest benefit. We introduce parallel tokenizers, a new framework that first trains tokenizers monolingually and then aligns their vocabularies exhaustively using bilingual dictionaries or word-to-word translation. This alignment enforces a shared semantic space across languages while naturally improving fertility balance. To assess their effectiveness, we pretrain a transformer encoder from scratch on thirteen low-resource languages and evaluate it on sentiment analysis, hate speech detection, emotion classification, and sentence embedding similarity. Across all tasks, models trained with parallel tokenizers outperform conventional multilingual baselines, confirming that rethinking tokenization is essential for advancing multilingual representation learning--especially in low-resource settings.
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