arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 21

Beyond Atomic Tokens: Factorizing Syllables for Language Model Pretraining

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.

By Nghia Hieu Nguyen, Thai Bao Huynh, Binh-An Dinh-Le, Phu Gia Hoang, Dat Tien Nguyen, Kiet Van Nguyen, Ngan Luu-Thuy Nguyen
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 23

Direct cueing of word identity through word duration: evidence from Mandarin homophones

The study investigates whether word duration can directly cue word identity in Mandarin Chinese homophones. Participants used duration differences to order homophone pairs, successfully mapping shorter durations to higher-frequency words even under high noise or with no other cues. These findings suggest that word duration is a phonetic detail incorporated into lexical representations.

By Xiaomeng Zhu, Megan Niu, Jason Shaw, Kevin Tang
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

Phonologically Informed Tokenization for German Speech Recognition: A Cross-Domain Study

The study evaluates phonologically informed tokenization for German speech recognition using a wav2vec 2.0 backbone fine‑tuned with CTC. Three tokenizer families—pretrained multilingual characters, data‑driven BPE, and phonologically informed units from syllabification and grapheme‑to‑phoneme conversion—are compared across 40 fine‑tunes on three German test sets (in‑domain read, dialectal spontaneous, and standard spontaneous speech). Results show that phonologically informed tokenizers match BPE and character baselines in‑domain, but under domain shift their performance depends on vocabulary size rather than linguistic variation, with syllable‑aware tokenization benefiting dialectal and spontaneous speech at small vocabularies; a phoneme‑level confusion analysis indicates that the acoustic encoder dominates error patterns.

By Christopher Witzl, Tobias Bocklet, Korbinian Riedhammer