用词素结构初始化嵌入,提升低资源语言模型表现
LGSE: Lexically Grounded Subword Embedding Initialization for Low-Resource Language Adaptation
- 基于词素分解构建新词嵌入,保留形态信息
- 在阿姆哈拉语和提格里尼亚语上性能超越基线
- 适合研究低资源语言与形态丰富的文本任务
将预训练语言模型适配到低资源、形态丰富的语言仍面临挑战。现有词汇扩展方法多依赖任意划分的子词单元,导致词汇表示碎片化并丢失关键形态信息。为此,我们提出词素引导的子词嵌入初始化(LGSE)框架,通过形态学感知的分段方式初始化新词嵌入。不采用随机向量或任意子词,而是将词语分解为词素,并通过平均预训练子词或FastText词素表示来构建语义连贯的嵌入。当无法分解为有意义词素时,则使用字符n-gram表示捕捉结构信息。在语言自适应预训练中,引入正则项惩罚新嵌入与其初始值的大幅偏离,保持与原预训练嵌入空间的一致性,同时支持目标语言的适应。为隔离初始化影响,保留原始预训练模型的词汇表和分词器,仅更新新增嵌入。我们在两个形态丰富、低资源的语言——阿姆哈拉语和提格里尼亚语上评估了三个NLP任务:问答、命名实体识别和文本分类,实验结果表明,LGSE在所有任务中均持续优于基线方法,证明了形态学引导嵌入初始化在提升代表性不足语言表示质量方面的有效性。项目资源可在GitHub链接获取。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Adapting pretrained language models to low-resource, morphologically rich languages remains a significant challenge. Existing vocabulary expansion methods typically rely on arbitrarily segmented subword units, resulting in fragmented lexical representations and loss of critical morphological information. To address this limitation, we propose the Lexically Grounded Subword Embedding Initialization (LGSE) framework, which introduces morphologically informed segmentation for initializing embeddings of novel tokens. Instead of using random vectors or arbitrary subwords, LGSE decomposes words into their constituent morphemes and constructs semantically coherent embeddings by averaging pretrained subword or FastText-based morpheme representations. When a token cannot be segmented into meaningful morphemes, its embedding is constructed using character n-gram representations to capture structural information. During Language-Adaptive Pretraining, we apply a regularization term that penalizes large deviations of newly introduced embeddings from their initialized values, preserving alignment with the original pretrained embedding space while enabling adaptation to the target language. To isolate the effect of initialization, we retain the original pre-trained model vocabulary and tokenizer and update only the new embeddings during adaptation. We evaluate LGSE on three NLP tasks: Question Answering, Named Entity Recognition, and Text Classification, in two morphologically rich, low-resource languages: Amharic and Tigrinya, where morphological segmentation resources are available. Experimental results show that LGSE consistently outperforms baseline methods across all tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of morphologically grounded embedding initialization for improving representation quality in underrepresented languages. Project resources are available in the GitHub link.
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。