Evaluating Morphological Plausibility of Subword Tokenization via Statistical Alignment with Morpho-Syntactic Features

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Stephen, Abishek, Libovický, Jindřich
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Stephen, Abishek
Libovický, Jindřich
author_facet Stephen, Abishek
Libovický, Jindřich
contents We present a novel metric for the evaluation of the morphological plausibility of subword segmentation. Unlike the typically used morpheme boundary or retrieval F-score, which requires gold segmentation data that is either unavailable or of inconsistent quality across many languages, our approach utilizes morpho-syntactic features. These are available in resources such as Universal Dependencies or UniMorph for a much wider range of languages. The metric works by probabilistically aligning subwords with morphological features through an IBM Model 1. Our experiments show that the metric correlates well with traditional morpheme boundary recall while being more broadly applicable across languages with different morphological systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_18536
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating Morphological Plausibility of Subword Tokenization via Statistical Alignment with Morpho-Syntactic Features
Stephen, Abishek
Libovický, Jindřich
Computation and Language
We present a novel metric for the evaluation of the morphological plausibility of subword segmentation. Unlike the typically used morpheme boundary or retrieval F-score, which requires gold segmentation data that is either unavailable or of inconsistent quality across many languages, our approach utilizes morpho-syntactic features. These are available in resources such as Universal Dependencies or UniMorph for a much wider range of languages. The metric works by probabilistically aligning subwords with morphological features through an IBM Model 1. Our experiments show that the metric correlates well with traditional morpheme boundary recall while being more broadly applicable across languages with different morphological systems.
title Evaluating Morphological Plausibility of Subword Tokenization via Statistical Alignment with Morpho-Syntactic Features
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18536