Splintering

This repository contains the code used in Splintering Nonconcatenative Languages for Better Tokenization.

It contains the Splinter algorithm as well as the intrinsic evaluation code.

The downstream evaluation DictaBERT-Splinter models can be found here.

The following example trains Splinter on Hebrew Wikipedia, encodes the training corpus, and uses it to train a BPE tokenizer:

from src.SplinterTrainer import SplinterTrainer
from src.TextProcessorWithEncoding import TextProcessorWithEncoding
from src.language_utils.LanguageUtilsFactory import LanguageUtilsFactory
from src.save_dataset_as_text_file import save_corpus_as_text_file
from src.train_tokenizer import train_tokenizer
from src.utils.path_utils import get_tokenizer_path, get_corpus_path
from src.utils.utils import get_corpus_name

language = 'he'
train_dataset_path = 'wikimedia/wikipedia'
train_dataset_name = f'20231101.{language}'
language_utils = LanguageUtilsFactory.get_by_language(language)

# train splinter: create the reductions map, and map the reductions in it into new Unicode characters
splinter_trainer = SplinterTrainer(language_utils)
reductions_map, new_unicode_chars_map, _ = splinter_trainer.train(train_dataset_path, train_dataset_name, None)

# splinter the corpus
text_processor = TextProcessorWithEncoding(language_utils, reductions_map, new_unicode_chars_map)
save_corpus_as_text_file(text_processor, train_dataset_path, train_dataset_name)

# train tokenizer on the splintered corpus 
tokenizer_corpus_path = get_corpus_path(get_corpus_name(train_dataset_path, train_dataset_name))
tokenizer_type = 'bpe'
vocab_size = 128000
tokenizer_path = get_tokenizer_path(tokenizer_type=tokenizer_type, vocab_size=vocab_size)
train_tokenizer(tokenizer_type=tokenizer_type, vocab_size=vocab_size, input_path=tokenizer_corpus_path, output_path=tokenizer_path)                     

Citation

If you use Splinter in your research, please cite Splintering Nonconcatenative Languages for Better Tokenization:

@misc{gazit2025splinteringnonconcatenativelanguagesbetter,
      title={Splintering Nonconcatenative Languages for Better Tokenization}, 
      author={Bar Gazit and Shaltiel Shmidman and Avi Shmidman and Yuval Pinter},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2503.14433},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14433}, 
}