5 ms·

> On a character level this should be trivial. Characters are not the semantic components of words—these are syllables. Generally speaking, anyway. I've got to

> On a character level this should be trivial. Characters are not the semantic components of words—these are syllables. Generally speaking, anyway. I've got to imagine this approach would yield higher quality results than the roman alphabet. I'm curious if this could be tested by just looking at how LLMs handle English vs Chinese.

inbetween 2y ago
The minimal semantic parts of words are morphemes. Syllables are phonological units (roughly: the minimal unit for rhythmic purposes such as stress, etc)
- darby_eight 2y ago
  Only in languages that have morphemes! This is hardly a universal attribute of language so much as an attribute of those that use an alphabet to encode sounds. It makes more sense to just bypass the encoding and directly consider the speech. Besides, considering morphemes as semantic often results in a completely different meaning than we actually intend. We aren't trying to train a chatbot to speak in prefixes and suffixes, we're trying to train a chatbot to speak in natural language, even if it is encoded to latin script before output.
  - inbetween 2y ago
    That's technically wrong. Every language has morphemes for the simple reason that every word is at least one morpheme. `cat` is a morpheme. `cats` is two morphemes (cat-s). (The point about semantics is also technically wrong. You would first need to specify your view of semantic compositionality before such a point can be evaluated, but the usual views of semantics don't have any such consequence.)
    - darby_eight 2y ago
      > Every language has morphemes for the simple reason that every word is at least one morpheme. Sure, if you define "morpheme" as a collection of syllables that's meaningful to people using alphabetic script. I don't see any benefit to this compared to working with syllables directly, which is a meaningful concept regardless of the script used to encode them.
      - inbetween 2y ago
        You might not see any benefit, but that's what those words mean :) Grab any textbook, it is linguistics 101!
      - dragonwriter 2y ago
        > Sure, if you define “morpheme” as a collection of syllables Cats, as noted, has two morphemes, despite having only one syllable. Syllables and morphemes are largely orthogonal, morphemes can be less than, equal to, or more than a syllable (and even when more than, may or may not start or end on a syllable boundary.) (Also, syllables aren’t the minimal semantic units even of spoken speech, those are phonemes – a syllable consists of at least one phoneme, potentially more. But morphemes, even an alphabetic script if it isn’t perfectly phonetic, still don’t necessarily map to one or more phonemes, since is textual semantic unit may have no effect on pronunciation.)

inbetween 2y ago

The minimal semantic parts of words are morphemes. Syllables are phonological units (roughly: the minimal unit for rhythmic purposes such as stress, etc)

darby_eight 2y ago
Only in languages that have morphemes! This is hardly a universal attribute of language so much as an attribute of those that use an alphabet to encode sounds. It makes more sense to just bypass the encoding and directly consider the speech. Besides, considering morphemes as semantic often results in a completely different meaning than we actually intend. We aren't trying to train a chatbot to speak in prefixes and suffixes, we're trying to train a chatbot to speak in natural language, even if it is encoded to latin script before output.
- inbetween 2y ago
  That's technically wrong. Every language has morphemes for the simple reason that every word is at least one morpheme. `cat` is a morpheme. `cats` is two morphemes (cat-s). (The point about semantics is also technically wrong. You would first need to specify your view of semantic compositionality before such a point can be evaluated, but the usual views of semantics don't have any such consequence.)
  - darby_eight 2y ago
    > Every language has morphemes for the simple reason that every word is at least one morpheme. Sure, if you define "morpheme" as a collection of syllables that's meaningful to people using alphabetic script. I don't see any benefit to this compared to working with syllables directly, which is a meaningful concept regardless of the script used to encode them.
    - inbetween 2y ago
      You might not see any benefit, but that's what those words mean :) Grab any textbook, it is linguistics 101!
    - dragonwriter 2y ago
      > Sure, if you define “morpheme” as a collection of syllables Cats, as noted, has two morphemes, despite having only one syllable. Syllables and morphemes are largely orthogonal, morphemes can be less than, equal to, or more than a syllable (and even when more than, may or may not start or end on a syllable boundary.) (Also, syllables aren’t the minimal semantic units even of spoken speech, those are phonemes – a syllable consists of at least one phoneme, potentially more. But morphemes, even an alphabetic script if it isn’t perfectly phonetic, still don’t necessarily map to one or more phonemes, since is textual semantic unit may have no effect on pronunciation.)