SampoNLP: A Self-Referential Toolkit for Morphological Analysis of Subword Tokenizers

Iaroslav Chelombitko, Ekaterina Chelombitko, Aleksey Komissarov


Abstract
The quality of subword tokenization is critical for Large Language Models, yet evaluating tokenizers for morphologically rich Uralic languages is hampered by the lack of clean morpheme lexicons. We introduce SampoNLP, a corpus-free toolkit for morphological lexicon creation using MDL-inspired Self-Referential Atomicity Scoring, which filters composite forms through internal structural cues - suited for low-resource settings. Using the high-purity lexicons generated by SampoNLP for Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian, we conduct a systematic evaluation of BPE tokenizers across a range of vocabulary sizes (8k–256k). We propose a unified metric, the Integrated Performance Score (IPS), to navigate the trade-off between morpheme coverage and over-splitting. By analyzing the IPS curves, we identify the “elbow points” of diminishing returns and provide the first empirically grounded recommendations for optimal vocabulary sizes (k) in these languages. Our study not only offers practical guidance but also quantitatively demonstrates the limitations of standard BPE for highly agglutinative languages. The SampoNLP library and all generated resources are made publicly available.
Anthology ID:
2025.iwclul-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Uralic Languages
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Joensuu, Finland
Editors:
Mika Hämäläinen, Michael Rießler, Eiaki V. Morooka, Lev Kharlashkin
Venues:
IWCLUL | WS
SIG:
SIGUR
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
57–67
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.iwclul-1.8/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Iaroslav Chelombitko, Ekaterina Chelombitko, and Aleksey Komissarov. 2025. SampoNLP: A Self-Referential Toolkit for Morphological Analysis of Subword Tokenizers. In Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Uralic Languages, pages 57–67, Joensuu, Finland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SampoNLP: A Self-Referential Toolkit for Morphological Analysis of Subword Tokenizers (Chelombitko et al., IWCLUL 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.iwclul-1.8.pdf