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Morphology-Driven Byte Encoding for Better Multilingual Language Modeling (arxiv.org)
1 point by PaulHoule on Mar 20, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of cutting text into characters, this encoding breaks it into word parts, giving chunks of similar length across languages. It shortened encodings for all 99 languages, most for non-Latin scripts, and narrowed the gap in how well the model predicts text across languages.

Abstract · MYTE: Morphology-Driven Byte Encoding for Better and Fairer Multilingual Language Modeling

A major consideration in multilingual language modeling is how to best represent languages with diverse vocabularies and scripts. Although contemporary text encoding methods cover most of the world's writing systems, they exhibit bias towards the high-resource languages of the Global West. As a result, texts of underrepresented languages tend to be segmented into long sequences of linguistically meaningless units. To address the disparities, we introduce a new paradigm that encodes the same information with segments of consistent size across diverse languages. Our encoding convention (MYTE) is based on morphemes, as their inventories are more balanced across languages than characters, which are used in previous methods. We show that MYTE produces shorter encodings for all 99 analyzed languages, with the most notable improvements for non-European languages and non-Latin scripts. This, in turn, improves multilingual LM performance and diminishes the perplexity gap throughout diverse languages.

Tomasz Limisiewicz, Terra Blevins, Hila Gonen, Orevaoghene Ahia, Luke Zettlemoyer
arXiv:2403.10691 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Mar 15, 2024 · updated Nov 11, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · Published at ACL 2024

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