arXiv:2608.17325cs.CL2026-08

让语言模型自己学分词,能生成更高效的新词汇。

What Tokens are Learned when Tokenization is Optimized Jointly with Language Modeling?

论文配图:What Tokens are Learned when Tokenization is Optimized Jointly with Language Modeling?
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 用模型联合优化分词,不再依赖固定分词器。
  • 新分词方式在18种语言上降低困惑度,效果优于传统方法。
  • 适合研究分词机制或想提升模型效率的开发者。

分词是语言建模的基础环节,但通常固定不变,影响模型性能。本文比较了无分词器方法(如SSLMs和H-Nets)与固定分词器在18种语言类型和书写系统多样的语言上的表现。结果表明,联合优化会根本性改变分词结构:SSLMs学习到与词素对齐且上下文高效的分词;而H-Nets则优先字节级效率,产生长且与标准子词词汇重叠极低的分词。不同语言类型表现出差异:黏着语有更动态的分割模式。下游评估显示,基于SSLM预分词的BERT模型在预训练-微调范式下持续降低语言建模困惑度,并实现与传统方法相当的下游性能。总体而言,无分词器方法更关注上下文与计算效率,而非严格词素结构,生成了本质不同却有效的词汇体系。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Tokenization is a fundamental component of language modeling pipelines. Despite its importance, it is often fixed, even though it significantly impacts model performance across languages. In this work, we analyze what tokens are learned when tokenization is jointly optimized with language modeling. We compare tokenizer-free approaches such as SSLMs and H-Nets with fixed tokenizers across 18 typologically and script-diverse languages. Our results show that joint optimization fundamentally alters token structure. SSLMs recover morphologically aligned and contextually efficient tokens, whereas H-Nets prioritize byte-level efficiency, producing longer tokens with very low overlap with standard subword vocabularies. We further show that tokenization behavior varies across language typologies. Agglutinative languages exhibit more dynamic segmentation patterns while learning. Through downstream evaluation, with pretrained-then-finetuned BERT models, we find that SSLM-based pretokenization consistently reduces language modeling perplexity and achieves competitive downstream performance despite distinct vocabularies. Overall, tokenizer-free approaches optimize for contextual and computational efficiency rather than strict morphological structure, resulting in fundamentally different yet effective vocabularies for downstream NLP.

分词优化语言模型无分词器

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