arXiv Machine Learning By Abdul Rehman Antall, Baidya Nath Saha

Does Morphological Correctness Matter for Tokenization? A Scrambled Control Study in Tagalog

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The study investigates whether morphological correctness influences tokenization effectiveness in Tagalog, a language with infix morphology that disrupts contiguous roots. Researchers developed MorphAustro‑Tok, a tokenizer that preserves the root as a contiguous unit and separates infixes, and compared it to a standard BPE baseline and a scrambled‑morpheme control that randomizes infix placement. Across multiple runs, MorphAustro‑Tok consistently outperformed the baseline, but the scrambled control showed no significant difference, indicating that morphological correctness does not contribute to the observed gains at this scale.

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