Analyzing Cognitive Plausibility of Subword Tokenization

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13348v1
• Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2023 08:25:37 GMT
• Title: Analyzing Cognitive Plausibility of Subword Tokenization
• Authors: Lisa Beinborn and Yuval Pinter
• Abstract summary: Subword tokenization has become the de-facto standard for tokenization. We present a new evaluation paradigm that focuses on the cognitive plausibility of subword tokenization.
• Score: 9.510439539246846
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Subword tokenization has become the de-facto standard for tokenization, although comparative evaluations of subword vocabulary quality across languages are scarce. Existing evaluation studies focus on the effect of a tokenization algorithm on the performance in downstream tasks, or on engineering criteria such as the compression rate. We present a new evaluation paradigm that focuses on the cognitive plausibility of subword tokenization. We analyze the correlation of the tokenizer output with the response time and accuracy of human performance on a lexical decision task. We compare three tokenization algorithms across several languages and vocabulary sizes. Our results indicate that the UnigramLM algorithm yields less cognitively plausible tokenization behavior and a worse coverage of derivational morphemes, in contrast with prior work.

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