Doğal Dil İşlemede Tokenizasyon Standartları ve Ölçümü: Türkçe Üzerinden Büyük Dil Modellerinin Karşılaştırmalı Analizi
This work addresses tokenization standards for low-resource and morphologically complex languages, offering practical improvements for NLP applications in such domains, though it is incremental as it builds on existing tokenization methods with new metrics.
The study tackled tokenization challenges for morphologically-rich languages like Turkish by introducing a novel evaluation framework using the TR-MMLU dataset, finding that language-specific token percentages correlate more strongly with downstream performance than token purity, and that increasing model parameters alone does not improve linguistic performance.
Tokenization is a fundamental preprocessing step in Natural Language Processing (NLP), significantly impacting the capability of large language models (LLMs) to capture linguistic and semantic nuances. This study introduces a novel evaluation framework addressing tokenization challenges specific to morphologically-rich and low-resource languages such as Turkish. Utilizing the Turkish MMLU (TR-MMLU) dataset, comprising 6,200 multiple-choice questions from the Turkish education system, we assessed tokenizers based on vocabulary size, token count, processing time, language-specific token percentages (\%TR), and token purity (\%Pure). These newly proposed metrics measure how effectively tokenizers preserve linguistic structures. Our analysis reveals that language-specific token percentages exhibit a stronger correlation with downstream performance (e.g., MMLU scores) than token purity. Furthermore, increasing model parameters alone does not necessarily enhance linguistic performance, underscoring the importance of tailored, language-specific tokenization methods. The proposed framework establishes robust and practical tokenization standards for morphologically complex languages.