%0 Conference Proceedings %T Revisiting Syllables in Language Modelling and Their Application on Low-Resource Machine Translation %A Oncevay, Arturo %A Rivas Rojas, Kervy Dante %A Chavez Sanchez, Liz Karen %A Zariquiey, Roberto %Y Calzolari, Nicoletta %Y Huang, Chu-Ren %Y Kim, Hansaem %Y Pustejovsky, James %Y Wanner, Leo %Y Choi, Key-Sun %Y Ryu, Pum-Mo %Y Chen, Hsin-Hsi %Y Donatelli, Lucia %Y Ji, Heng %Y Kurohashi, Sadao %Y Paggio, Patrizia %Y Xue, Nianwen %Y Kim, Seokhwan %Y Hahm, Younggyun %Y He, Zhong %Y Lee, Tony Kyungil %Y Santus, Enrico %Y Bond, Francis %Y Na, Seung-Hoon %S Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics %D 2022 %8 October %I International Committee on Computational Linguistics %C Gyeongju, Republic of Korea %F oncevay-etal-2022-revisiting %X Language modelling and machine translation tasks mostly use subword or character inputs, but syllables are seldom used. Syllables provide shorter sequences than characters, require less-specialised extracting rules than morphemes, and their segmentation is not impacted by the corpus size. In this study, we first explore the potential of syllables for open-vocabulary language modelling in 21 languages. We use rule-based syllabification methods for six languages and address the rest with hyphenation, which works as a syllabification proxy. With a comparable perplexity, we show that syllables outperform characters and other subwords. Moreover, we study the importance of syllables on neural machine translation for a non-related and low-resource language-pair (Spanish–Shipibo-Konibo). In pairwise and multilingual systems, syllables outperform unsupervised subwords, and further morphological segmentation methods, when translating into a highly synthetic language with a transparent orthography (Shipibo-Konibo). Finally, we perform some human evaluation, and discuss limitations and opportunities. %U https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.374 %P 4258-4267