Saved in:
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2023
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.01393 |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
Table of Contents:
- Subword tokenization is the de facto standard for tokenization in neural language models and machine translation systems. Three advantages are frequently cited in favor of subwords: shorter encoding of frequent tokens, compositionality of subwords, and ability to deal with unknown words. As their relative importance is not entirely clear yet, we propose a tokenization approach that enables us to separate frequency (the first advantage) from compositionality. The approach uses Huffman coding to tokenize words, by order of frequency, using a fixed amount of symbols. Experiments with CS-DE, EN-FR and EN-DE NMT show that frequency alone accounts for 90%-95% of the scores reached by BPE, hence compositionality has less importance than previously thought.