Unsupervised Morphological Tree Tokenizer

As a cornerstone in language modeling, tokenization involves segmenting text inputs into pre-defined atomic units.Conventional statistical tokenizers often disrupt constituent boundaries within words, thereby corrupting semantic information.To address this drawback, we introduce morphological structure guidance to tokenization and propose a deep model to induce character-level structures of words.Specifically, the deep model jointly encodes internal structures and representations of words with a mechanism named MorphOverriding to ensure the indecomposability of morphemes.By training the model with self-supervised objectives, our method is capable of inducing characterlevel structures that align with morphological rules without annotated training data.Based on the induced structures, our algorithm tokenizes words through vocabulary matching in a top-down manner.Empirical results indicate that the proposed method effectively retains complete morphemes and outperforms widely adopted methods such as BPE and WordPiece on both morphological segmentation tasks and language modeling tasks.

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Publication Details

Published
2025-01-01
DOI
https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.1146
Primary Topic
Neural Networks and Applications
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

Unsupervised Morphological Tree Tokenizer

Wei Wu, Xiang Hu, Qingyang Zhu, Kewei Tu et al.
Neural Networks and Applications
article

Unsupervised Morphological Tree Tokenizer

Wei Wu, Xiang Hu, Qingyang Zhu, Kewei Tu, Pengyu Ji
article en

Abstract

As a cornerstone in language modeling, tokenization involves segmenting text inputs into pre-defined atomic units.Conventional statistical tokenizers often disrupt constituent boundaries within words, thereby corrupting semantic information.To address this drawback, we introduce morphological structure guidance to tokenization and propose a deep model to induce character-level structures of words.Specifically, the deep model jointly encodes internal structures and representations of words with a mechanism named MorphOverriding to ensure the indecomposability of morphemes.By training the model with self-supervised objectives, our method is capable of inducing characterlevel structures that align with morphological rules without annotated training data.Based on the induced structures, our algorithm tokenizes words through vocabulary matching in a top-down manner.Empirical results indicate that the proposed method effectively retains complete morphemes and outperforms widely adopted methods such as BPE and WordPiece on both morphological segmentation tasks and language modeling tasks.

National Science Foundation
Openalex Percentile: Top 90%
Neural Networks and Applications
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