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SampoNLP: A Self-Referential Toolkit for Morphological Analysis of Subword Tokenizers

Published: January 8, 2026 | arXiv ID: 2601.04469v1

By: Iaroslav Chelombitko, Ekaterina Chelombitko, Aleksey Komissarov

Potential Business Impact:

Helps computers understand languages with many word parts.

Business Areas:
Natural Language Processing Artificial Intelligence, Data and Analytics, Software

The quality of subword tokenization is critical for Large Language Models, yet evaluating tokenizers for morphologically rich Uralic languages is hampered by the lack of clean morpheme lexicons. We introduce SampoNLP, a corpus-free toolkit for morphological lexicon creation using MDL-inspired Self-Referential Atomicity Scoring, which filters composite forms through internal structural cues - suited for low-resource settings. Using the high-purity lexicons generated by SampoNLP for Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian, we conduct a systematic evaluation of BPE tokenizers across a range of vocabulary sizes (8k-256k). We propose a unified metric, the Integrated Performance Score (IPS), to navigate the trade-off between morpheme coverage and over-splitting. By analyzing the IPS curves, we identify the "elbow points" of diminishing returns and provide the first empirically grounded recommendations for optimal vocabulary sizes (k) in these languages. Our study not only offers practical guidance but also quantitatively demonstrates the limitations of standard BPE for highly agglutinative languages. The SampoNLP library and all generated resources are made publicly available: https://github.com/AragonerUA/SampoNLP

Repos / Data Links

Page Count
11 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Computation and Language