A Character-Level Neural Approach to Sinhala Sandhi Splitting
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arXiv:2609. 21362v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conventional tokenizers represent text as characters or statistically derived subwords, overlooking the internal phonological structure of syllables and often requiring large vocabularies.
The paper presents an end‑to‑end sequence‑to‑sequence approach for correcting Tamil spelling and grammar errors, leveraging progressively fine‑tuned transformer models (mT5‑small and mBART‑50). Using a synthetic corpus of 657,720 noisy‑clean sentence pairs across ten error categories, the authors introduce a four‑stage training schedule that targets surface noise, contextual grammar, single‑site sandhi, and multi‑site cross‑word sandhi. The best model, mBART‑50 v5, achieves 69.3% exact‑match accuracy on a balanced diagnostic set, with notable gains in sandhi (87.5%) and subject‑verb agreement (43.5%) accuracy, while also revealing a precision‑recall trade‑off for sandhi corrections.
The paper introduces SinLlama, the first decoder‑based open‑source large language model with explicit support for Sinhala. By extending Llama‑3‑8B, adding Sinhala‑specific tokenizer vocabulary, and performing continual pre‑training on a cleaned 10‑million‑token Sinhala corpus, the authors created a model that surpasses both the base and instruction‑fine‑tuned variants of Llama‑3‑8B on three text classification tasks. This work addresses the underrepresentation of low‑resource languages in open‑source LLMs.
arXiv:2606. 15144v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) process text as sequences of subword tokens, which can obscure the character-level and morphological structure that underlies word formation.
arXiv:2608. 01281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Phoneme-based multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) can share acoustic evidence across languages more directly than language-specific subword modeling.
arXiv:2606. 18717v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Turkish is agglutinative: meaning is carried by morphemes, yet the subword tokenizers that drive modern language models split words by corpus statistics, fragmenting semantically loaded suffixes and -- in the case of WordPiece and rule-based analyzers -- failing to decode their output back to the original text.