为印度古典语言设计的智能分词器,让技术术语更紧凑
BHARATI: Morphology-Aware Tokenizers for Classical Indian Languages with Subword Fertility Analysis

- 基于语素特征与音变分析,定制多语言分词模型
- 对梵语术语平均仅需2.6个子词,比GPT-2少一半以上
- 适合研究印度知识体系、古典语言处理的研究者
标准子词分词算法如BPE和SentencePiece主要基于现代语言语料训练,应用于梵语、泰米尔语等印度古典语言时效果不佳。这些语言具有黏着性构词、音变融合及领域专有词汇等特性,而通用语料中缺乏此类数据。本文提出BHARATI,一套在781MB平衡语料上训练的SentencePiece BPE分词器,涵盖英语、印地语、梵语、泰米尔语、泰卢固语、卡纳达语和马拉雅拉姆语七种语言,均支持原生文字。分词器分为v1(英梵)、v2(四语言)和v3(全七语言)三个版本。子词频度分析显示,v3对印度知识体系(IKS)技术术语平均仅需2.6个子词,显著优于GPT-2分词器的5.25和多语言SentencePiece基线的3.75。在490句跨语言测试集(每语言70句)上,v3相较GPT-2和字节级编码减少约90%序列长度,较mBART-50基线减少约25%,有效提升下游模型上下文容量。分词模型(32,000词表)、训练脚本与评估基准均已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Standard subword tokenization algorithms such as Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) and SentencePiece are trained predominantly on modern language corpora and produce inefficient segmentations when applied to classical Indian languages. Sanskrit, Tamil, and other classical Indic languages exhibit agglutinative morphology, productive sandhi (phonological fusion at word boundaries), and domain-specific vocabularies absent from general-purpose training data. This paper presents BHARATI, a set of SentencePiece BPE tokenizers trained on a balanced 781 MB corpus spanning seven languages (English, Hindi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam) with native script support for all languages. We describe three successive tokenizer versions: v1 (English and Sanskrit only, with broken byte-fallback for Tamil), v2 (four-language support with byte-level fallback for southern languages), and v3 (full seven-language native subword coverage). Subword fertility analysis demonstrates that v3 averages 2.6 tokens per Indian Knowledge System (IKS) technical term, compared to 5.25 tokens per term with GPT-2's tokenizer and 3.75 tokens with the multilingual SentencePiece baseline, with the largest gains on a set of reserved IKS terms that are represented as single tokens by construction. On a held-out test set of 490 IKS-domain sentences (70 per language across seven languages, released with the measurement script), v3 reduces sequence length by roughly 90% relative to GPT-2 and byte-level encoding (which lack native Indic subwords) and by approximately 25% relative to the mBART-50 multilingual baseline, averaged across the six Indic languages, directly translating to increased effective context length for downstream language models. The tokenizer models (32,000 vocabulary), training scripts, and evaluation benchmarks are released under open licenses.
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。