Papers
Topics
Authors
Recent
Gemini 2.5 Flash
Gemini 2.5 Flash
117 tokens/sec
GPT-4o
8 tokens/sec
Gemini 2.5 Pro Pro
47 tokens/sec
o3 Pro
5 tokens/sec
GPT-4.1 Pro
38 tokens/sec
DeepSeek R1 via Azure Pro
28 tokens/sec
2000 character limit reached

Word Boundary Information Isn't Useful for Encoder Language Models (2401.07923v2)

Published 15 Jan 2024 in cs.CL

Abstract: All existing transformer-based approaches to NLP using subword tokenisation algorithms encode whitespace (word boundary information) through the use of special space symbols (such as ## or _) forming part of tokens. These symbols have been shown to a) lead to reduced morphological validity of tokenisations, and b) give substantial vocabulary redundancy. As such, removing these symbols has been shown to have a beneficial effect on the processing of morphologically complex words for transformer encoders in the pretrain-finetune paradigm. In this work, we explore whether word boundary information is at all useful to such models. In particular, we train transformer encoders across four different training scales, and investigate several alternative approaches to including word boundary information, evaluating on a range of tasks across different domains and problem set-ups: GLUE (for sentence-level classification), NER (for token-level classification), and two classification datasets involving complex words (Superbizarre and FLOTA). Overall, through an extensive experimental setup that includes the pre-training of 29 models, we find no substantial improvements from our alternative approaches, suggesting that modifying tokenisers to remove word boundary information isn't leading to a loss of useful information.

Citations (2)

Summary

We haven't generated a summary for this paper yet.