Sub-character neural language modelling in japanese

Abstract

In East Asian languages such as Japanese and Chinese, the semantics of a character are (somewhat) reflected in its sub-character elements. This paper examines the effect of using subcharacters for language modeling in Japanese. This is achieved by decomposing characters according to a range of character decomposition datasets, and training a neural language model over variously decomposed character representations. Our results indicate that language modelling can be improved through the inclusion of subcharacters, though this result depends on a good choice of decomposition dataset and the appropriate granularity of decomposition.