Language-Independent Tokenisation Rivals Language-Specific Tokenisation for Word Similarity Prediction

Danushka Bollegala, Ryuichi Kiryo, Kosuke Tsujino, Haruki Yukawa


Abstract
Language-independent tokenisation (LIT) methods that do not require labelled language resources or lexicons have recently gained popularity because of their applicability in resource-poor languages. Moreover, they compactly represent a language using a fixed size vocabulary and can efficiently handle unseen or rare words. On the other hand, language-specific tokenisation (LST) methods have a long and established history, and are developed using carefully created lexicons and training resources. Unlike subtokens produced by LIT methods, LST methods produce valid morphological subwords. Despite the contrasting trade-offs between LIT vs. LST methods, their performance on downstream NLP tasks remain unclear. In this paper, we empirically compare the two approaches using semantic similarity measurement as an evaluation task across a diverse set of languages. Our experimental results covering eight languages show that LST consistently outperforms LIT when the vocabulary size is large, but LIT can produce comparable or better results than LST in many languages with comparatively smaller (i.e. less than 100K words) vocabulary sizes, encouraging the use of LIT when language-specific resources are unavailable, incomplete or a smaller model is required. Moreover, we find that smoothed inverse frequency (SIF) to be an accurate method to create word embeddings from subword embeddings for multilingual semantic similarity prediction tasks. Further analysis of the nearest neighbours of tokens show that semantically and syntactically related tokens are closely embedded in subword embedding spaces.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.475
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
3851–3860
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.475
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Danushka Bollegala, Ryuichi Kiryo, Kosuke Tsujino, and Haruki Yukawa. 2020. Language-Independent Tokenisation Rivals Language-Specific Tokenisation for Word Similarity Prediction. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 3851–3860, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Language-Independent Tokenisation Rivals Language-Specific Tokenisation for Word Similarity Prediction (Bollegala et al., LREC 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.475.pdf