arXiv · 2307.07262
MorphPiece : A Linguistic Tokenizer for Large Language Models
Abstract
Tokenization is a critical part of modern NLP pipelines. However, contemporary tokenizers for Large Language Models are based on statistical analysis of text corpora, without much consideration to the linguistic features. I propose a linguistically motivated tokenization scheme, MorphPiece, which is based partly on morphological segmentation of the underlying text. A GPT-style causal language model trained on this tokenizer (called MorphGPT) shows comparable or superior performance on a variety of supervised and unsupervised NLP tasks, compared to the OpenAI GPT-2 model. Specifically I evaluated MorphGPT on language modeling tasks, zero-shot performance on GLUE Benchmark with various prompt templates, massive text embedding benchmark (MTEB) for supervised and unsupervised performance, and lastly with another morphological tokenization scheme (FLOTA, Hoffmann et al., 2022) and find that the model trained on MorphPiece outperforms GPT-2 on most evaluations, at times with considerable margin, despite being trained for about half the training iterations.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Haris Jabbar. 2023-07-14. MorphPiece : A Linguistic Tokenizer for Large Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07262
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.