Lexically Grounded Subword Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Libovický, Jindřich, Helcl, Jindřich
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Libovický, Jindřich
Helcl, Jindřich
author_facet Libovický, Jindřich
Helcl, Jindřich
contents We present three innovations in tokenization and subword segmentation. First, we propose to use unsupervised morphological analysis with Morfessor as pre-tokenization. Second, we present an algebraic method for obtaining subword embeddings grounded in a word embedding space. Based on that, we design a novel subword segmentation algorithm that uses the embeddings, ensuring that the procedure considers lexical meaning. Third, we introduce an efficient segmentation algorithm based on a subword bigram model that can be initialized with the lexically aware segmentation method to avoid using Morfessor and large embedding tables at inference time. We evaluate the proposed approaches using two intrinsic metrics and measure their performance on two downstream tasks: part-of-speech tagging and machine translation. Our experiments show significant improvements in the morphological plausibility of the segmentation when evaluated using segmentation precision on morpheme boundaries and improved Rényi efficiency in 8 languages. Although the proposed tokenization methods do not have a large impact on automatic translation quality, we observe consistent performance gains in the arguably more morphological task of part-of-speech tagging.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_13560
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Lexically Grounded Subword Segmentation
Libovický, Jindřich
Helcl, Jindřich
Computation and Language
We present three innovations in tokenization and subword segmentation. First, we propose to use unsupervised morphological analysis with Morfessor as pre-tokenization. Second, we present an algebraic method for obtaining subword embeddings grounded in a word embedding space. Based on that, we design a novel subword segmentation algorithm that uses the embeddings, ensuring that the procedure considers lexical meaning. Third, we introduce an efficient segmentation algorithm based on a subword bigram model that can be initialized with the lexically aware segmentation method to avoid using Morfessor and large embedding tables at inference time. We evaluate the proposed approaches using two intrinsic metrics and measure their performance on two downstream tasks: part-of-speech tagging and machine translation. Our experiments show significant improvements in the morphological plausibility of the segmentation when evaluated using segmentation precision on morpheme boundaries and improved Rényi efficiency in 8 languages. Although the proposed tokenization methods do not have a large impact on automatic translation quality, we observe consistent performance gains in the arguably more morphological task of part-of-speech tagging.
title Lexically Grounded Subword Segmentation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.13560