SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing

Taku Kudo, John Richardson


Abstract
This paper describes SentencePiece, a language-independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer designed for Neural-based text processing, including Neural Machine Translation. It provides open-source C++ and Python implementations for subword units. While existing subword segmentation tools assume that the input is pre-tokenized into word sequences, SentencePiece can train subword models directly from raw sentences, which allows us to make a purely end-to-end and language independent system. We perform a validation experiment of NMT on English-Japanese machine translation, and find that it is possible to achieve comparable accuracy to direct subword training from raw sentences. We also compare the performance of subword training and segmentation with various configurations. SentencePiece is available under the Apache 2 license at https://github.com/google/sentencepiece.
Anthology ID:
D18-2012
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Month:
November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Eduardo Blanco, Wei Lu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
66–71
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-2012
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-2012
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Taku Kudo and John Richardson. 2018. SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pages 66–71, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing (Kudo & Richardson, EMNLP 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-2012.pdf
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