Subword Tokenization

Subword Tokenization

Subword tokenization is a technique used in natural language processing (NLP) that involves breaking down words into smaller subwords or pieces. This technique is particularly useful for languages with complex morphology, where words can have multiple forms and meanings.

How it Works

Subword tokenization involves breaking down words into smaller subword units based on their frequency in a given corpus of text. The most common subword units are then used as building blocks to represent words in the corpus. This allows for more efficient use of memory and better handling of out-of-vocabulary words.

Benefits

Subword tokenization has various benefits, including:

Improved performance: Subword tokenization can improve the performance of NLP models by reducing the number of out-of-vocabulary words and improving the handling of rare words. Multilingual support: Subword tokenization can be used to handle multiple languages with complex morphology, making it a valuable tool for multilingual NLP applications. Efficient memory usage: Subword tokenization allows for more efficient use of memory by representing words as a combination of smaller subword units.

How to Use Subword Tokenization

Subword tokenization is commonly used in NLP tasks such as machine translation, text classification, and named entity recognition. It can be implemented using various libraries such as SentencePiece, BPEmb, and Hugging Face’s Tokenizers.

Here are some additional resources to learn more about subword tokenization:

Subword Regularization: Improving Neural Network Translation Models with Multiple Subword Candidates - a paper that discusses the benefits of subword regularization in neural machine translation. SentencePiece - a library for subword tokenization that supports multiple languages and various algorithms. Hugging Face Tokenizers - a library for subword tokenization and other text preprocessing tasks, with support for multiple languages and various algorithms.

Subword tokenization is a powerful technique that can improve the performance of NLP models and handle complex morphology in multiple languages. By breaking down words into smaller subword units, it allows for more efficient use of memory and better handling of out-of-vocabulary words.