Revisiting subword tokenization: A case study on affixal negation in large language models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2404.02421v2
• Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2024 04:52:37 GMT
• Title: Revisiting subword tokenization: A case study on affixal negation in large language models
• Authors: Thinh Hung Truong, Yulia Otmakhova, Karin Verspoor, Trevor Cohn, Timothy Baldwin,
• Abstract summary: We measure the impact of affixal negation on modern English large language models (LLMs) We conduct experiments using LLMs with different subword tokenization methods. We show that models can, on the whole, reliably recognize the meaning of affixal negation.
• Score: 57.75279238091522
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: In this work, we measure the impact of affixal negation on modern English large language models (LLMs). In affixal negation, the negated meaning is expressed through a negative morpheme, which is potentially challenging for LLMs as their tokenizers are often not morphologically plausible. We conduct extensive experiments using LLMs with different subword tokenization methods, which lead to several insights on the interaction between tokenization performance and negation sensitivity. Despite some interesting mismatches between tokenization accuracy and negation detection performance, we show that models can, on the whole, reliably recognize the meaning of affixal negation.

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