Papers › Beyond Characters: Subword-level Morpheme Segmentation

Beyond Characters: Subword-level Morpheme Segmentation

1 Jul 2022NAACL (SIGMORPHON) 2022 7archive 2025-07-28

Ben Peters, Andre F. T. Martins

This paper presents DeepSPIN’s submissions to the SIGMORPHON 2022 Shared Task on Morpheme Segmentation. We make three submissions, all to the word-level subtask. First, we show that entmax-based sparse sequence-tosequence models deliver large improvements over conventional softmax-based models, echoing results from other tasks. Then, we challenge the assumption that models for morphological tasks should be trained at the character level by building a transformer that generates morphemes as sequences of unigram language model-induced subwords. This subword transformer outperforms all of our character-level models and wins the word-level subtask. Although we do not submit an official submission to the sentence-level subtask, we show that this subword-based approach is highly effective there as well.

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Tasks

Language ModelingLanguage ModellingMorpheme SegmentaitonSegmentationSentence

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Morpheme Segmentaiton UniMorph 4.0 Subword-ULM transformer (DeepSPIN-3; soft-attention, 1-5 entmax) macro avg (subtask 1) 97.29 #1 of 19 Archive leaderboard report
Morpheme Segmentaiton UniMorph 4.0 Char LSTM (DeepSPIN-2; soft-attention, 1-5 entmax) macro avg (subtask 1) 97.15 #2 of 19 Archive leaderboard report
Morpheme Segmentaiton UniMorph 4.0 Char LSTM (DeepSPIN-1; soft-attention) macro avg (subtask 1) 96.32 #4 of 19 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

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