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We design a test suite to evaluate segmentation strategies on different types of morphological phenomena in a controlled, semi-synthetic setting. In our experiments, we compare how well machine translation models trained on subword- and character-level can translate these morphological phenomena. We find that learning to analyse and generate morphologically complex surface representations is still challenging, especially for non-concatenative morphological phenomena like reduplication or vowel harmony and for rare word stems. Based on our results, we recommend that novel text representation strategies be tested on a range of typologically diverse languages to minimise the risk of adopting a strategy that inadvertently disadvantages certain languages.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.01100v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.01100v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"how-suitable-are-subword-segmentation","repo_url":"https://github.com/zurichnlp/segtest","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"machine-translation","task_name":"Machine Translation"},{"task_slug":"segmentation","task_name":"Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2109.01100","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2109.01100"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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