Comprehensive Research Report & Full Ablation Study
This repository contains NLP models trained and evaluated by Wikilangs, specifically on Sicilian Wikipedia data.
We analyze tokenizers, n-gram models, Markov chains, vocabulary statistics, and word embeddings.
📋 Repository Contents
Models & Assets
Tokenizers (8k, 16k, 32k, 64k)
N-gram models (2, 3, 4, 5-gram)
Markov chains (context of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5)
Subword N-gram and Markov chains
Embeddings in various sizes and dimensions (aligned and unaligned)
Trade-off: Larger vocabularies improve compression but increase model size
Recommendation: 32k vocabulary provides optimal balance for production use
2. N-gram Model Evaluation
N-gram Perplexity
N-gram Unique
N-gram Coverage
Results
N-gram
Variant
Perplexity
Entropy
Unique N-grams
Top-100 Coverage
Top-1000 Coverage
2-gram
Word
16,384
14.00
58,233
15.6%
34.5%
2-gram
Subword
244 🏆
7.93
4,404
70.4%
99.0%
3-gram
Word
24,141
14.56
72,090
12.9%
28.3%
3-gram
Subword
2,050
11.00
34,045
29.2%
74.5%
4-gram
Word
36,264
15.15
109,633
12.4%
28.1%
4-gram
Subword
12,335
13.59
174,994
13.1%
41.0%
5-gram
Word
23,643
14.53
73,924
12.6%
32.9%
5-gram
Subword
48,581
15.57
458,275
7.8%
23.9%
Top 5 N-grams by Size
2-grams (Word):
Rank
N-gram
Count
1
pruvincia di
15,198
2
dâ pruvincia
14,084
3
di l
11,236
4
è un
5,502
5
è nu
5,227
3-grams (Word):
Rank
N-gram
Count
1
dâ pruvincia di
13,755
2
è un cumuni
4,935
3
talianu dâ pruvincia
4,537
4
cumuni talianu dâ
4,533
5
un cumuni talianu
4,497
4-grams (Word):
Rank
N-gram
Count
1
cumuni talianu dâ pruvincia
4,533
2
è un cumuni talianu
4,497
3
un cumuni talianu dâ
4,420
4
talianu dâ pruvincia di
4,404
5
abbitanti dâ pruvincia di
1,920
5-grams (Word):
Rank
N-gram
Count
1
è un cumuni talianu dâ
4,420
2
un cumuni talianu dâ pruvincia
4,420
3
cumuni talianu dâ pruvincia di
4,400
4
ntâ lummardìa dâ pruvincia di
1,512
5
nu cumuni dâ pruvincia di
1,411
2-grams (Subword):
Rank
N-gram
Count
1
i _
648,749
2
a _
449,210
3
u _
428,360
4
_ d
299,061
5
_ c
245,777
3-grams (Subword):
Rank
N-gram
Count
1
_ d i
173,046
2
d i _
150,142
3
n i _
97,798
4
t i _
93,979
5
i _ d
89,842
4-grams (Subword):
Rank
N-gram
Count
1
_ d i _
140,256
2
i _ d i
52,971
3
_ l u _
51,883
4
a _ d i
47,082
5
_ l a _
44,178
5-grams (Subword):
Rank
N-gram
Count
1
i _ d i _
43,124
2
a _ d i _
41,391
3
u _ d i _
29,866
4
_ d i _ l
28,707
5
i o n i _
27,862
Key Findings
Best Perplexity: 2-gram (subword) with 244
Entropy Trend: Decreases with larger n-grams (more predictable)
Coverage: Top-1000 patterns cover ~24% of corpus
Recommendation: 4-gram or 5-gram for best predictive performance
3. Markov Chain Evaluation
Markov Entropy
Markov Contexts
Markov Branching
Results
Context
Variant
Avg Entropy
Perplexity
Branching Factor
Unique Contexts
Predictability
1
Word
0.8233
1.769
5.57
202,619
17.7%
1
Subword
1.0275
2.038
8.59
1,252
0.0%
2
Word
0.2739
1.209
1.68
1,121,596
72.6%
2
Subword
1.0284
2.040
6.37
10,748
0.0%
3
Word
0.0907
1.065
1.15
1,872,306
90.9%
3
Subword
0.8687
1.826
4.42
68,346
13.1%
4
Word
0.0294 🏆
1.021
1.04
2,146,546
97.1%
4
Subword
0.6923
1.616
3.02
301,807
30.8%
Generated Text Samples (Word-based)
Below are text samples generated from each word-based Markov chain model:
Context Size 1:
di l utilizzu eni uguali n maduna surmuntatu spissu china occupies a spidercam telecamera e di
e in ebbica abbastanza nichi e riazzioni tinta tinta ntô 480 a parallassi dâ prima ranni
lu divintaru famusi macari li pupulazzioni di fora dû branu cu la situazzioni 1 cor damaya
Context Size 2:
pruvincia di salernu havi na pupulazzioni di 1 chistu pirmetti ô browser di mozilla firefox sunnu sc...
dâ pruvincia di frusinuni havi na vota ntô 147º e na storia assai àutru centru di lu
di l aquila havi na pupulazzioni di 1 a 29 annu e ô dramma sacru di la
Context Size 3:
dâ pruvincia di asti ntô piemunti dâ pruvincia di palermu la notti dû 22 di dicèmmiru fu nu
è un cumuni talianu dâ pruvincia di cremona ntâ lummardìa havi na pupulazzioni di 2 807 abbitanti dâ
talianu dâ pruvincia di sarausa puru si la vilucitati dâ luci sia isutropica ossia ca avi u stissu
Context Size 4:
cumuni talianu dâ pruvincia di carbonia iglesias ntâ sardigna dâ pruvincia di oristanu ntâ sardigna ...
è un cumuni talianu dâ pruvincia di nuvara ntô piemunti dâ pruvincia di cuneu ntô piemunti dâ pruvin...
un cumuni talianu dâ pruvincia di pavìa ntâ lummardìa dâ pruvincia di bèrgamu ntâ lummardìa dâ pruvi...
Generated Text Samples (Subword-based)
Below are text samples generated from each subword-based Markov chain model:
Context Size 1:
_pìu_duvi_nta_dî
imprersio_ncidi_
a_di_le_antô_–_s
Context Size 2:
i_rinciriglia,_«c
a_a_acquersanuota
u_acquagnu_do'_va
Context Size 3:
_di_l'asempion:_th
di_mai_di_gueva_nz
ni_tantironali_a_j
Context Size 4:
_di_giugnu_'n_arban
i_di_cuntra_venneme
_lu_nùmmuru_nizo_ne
Key Findings
Best Predictability: Context-4 (word) with 97.1% predictability
Branching Factor: Decreases with context size (more deterministic)
Memory Trade-off: Larger contexts require more storage (301,807 contexts)
Recommendation: Context-3 or Context-4 for text generation
4. Vocabulary Analysis
Zipf's Law
Top Words
Coverage Curve
Statistics
Metric
Value
Vocabulary Size
86,322
Total Tokens
2,462,744
Mean Frequency
28.53
Median Frequency
4
Frequency Std Dev
696.15
Most Common Words
Rank
Word
Frequency
1
di
140,762
2
e
60,379
3
lu
55,075
4
a
51,553
5
la
47,116
6
l
39,892
7
dâ
32,478
8
è
31,791
9
li
30,388
10
n
24,459
Least Common Words (from vocabulary)
Rank
Word
Frequency
1
artificaili
2
2
degeneratu
2
3
impress
2
4
escaldes
2
5
engordany
2
6
sabigotho
2
7
reiter
2
8
homestuck
2
9
manganelli
2
10
emiciclu
2
Zipf's Law Analysis
Metric
Value
Zipf Coefficient
1.0191
R² (Goodness of Fit)
0.998927
Adherence Quality
excellent
Coverage Analysis
Top N Words
Coverage
Top 100
41.6%
Top 1,000
63.1%
Top 5,000
78.3%
Top 10,000
84.5%
Key Findings
Zipf Compliance: R²=0.9989 indicates excellent adherence to Zipf's law
High Frequency Dominance: Top 100 words cover 41.6% of corpus
Long Tail: 76,322 words needed for remaining 15.5% coverage
5. Word Embeddings Evaluation
Embedding Isotropy
Similarity Matrix
t-SNE Words
t-SNE Sentences
5.1 Cross-Lingual Alignment
Alignment Quality
Multilingual t-SNE
5.2 Model Comparison
Model
Dimension
Isotropy
Semantic Density
Alignment R@1
Alignment R@10
mono_32d
32
0.8559 🏆
0.3184
N/A
N/A
mono_64d
64
0.8517
0.2317
N/A
N/A
mono_128d
128
0.7450
0.1848
N/A
N/A
aligned_32d
32
0.8559
0.3200
0.0900
0.3440
aligned_64d
64
0.8517
0.2295
0.1380
0.4440
aligned_128d
128
0.7450
0.1777
0.2000
0.5420
Key Findings
Best Isotropy: mono_32d with 0.8559 (more uniform distribution)
Semantic Density: Average pairwise similarity of 0.2437. Lower values indicate better semantic separation.
Alignment Quality: Aligned models achieve up to 20.0% R@1 in cross-lingual retrieval.
Recommendation: 128d aligned for best cross-lingual performance
6. Morphological Analysis (Experimental)
This section presents an automated morphological analysis derived from the statistical divergence between word-level and subword-level models. By analyzing where subword predictability spikes and where word-level coverage fails, we can infer linguistic structures without supervised data.
6.1 Productivity & Complexity
Metric
Value
Interpretation
Recommendation
Productivity Index
5.000
High morphological productivity
Reliable analysis
Idiomaticity Gap
0.381
High formulaic/idiomatic content
-
6.2 Affix Inventory (Productive Units)
These are the most productive prefixes and suffixes identified by sampling the vocabulary for global substitutability patterns. A unit is considered an affix if stripping it leaves a valid stem that appears in other contexts.
Productive Prefixes
Prefix
Examples
-s
schianari, straputiri, spirimintàvanu
-a
aglabita, abbunata, azzurri
-c
chidja, calculatu, catenanuova
-m
mladic, medioevo, mintennu
-p
presu, puvuredda, puacu
-ca
calculatu, catenanuova, calabbra
-n
negroponte, nnustri, ntitulata
-ma
magistri, majistrìa, maladzečna
Productive Suffixes
Suffix
Examples
-i
schianari, liberi, itali
-u
calculatu, mintennu, presu
-a
chidja, aglabita, catenanuova
-ti
acuti, disignati, fimmati
-ni
moroni, littoni, valanzuni
-ri
schianari, liberi, azzurri
-tu
calculatu, scuraggiatu, nzignatu
-nu
mintennu, infantinu, spirimintàvanu
6.3 Bound Stems (Lexical Roots)
Bound stems are high-frequency subword units that are semantically cohesive but rarely appear as standalone words. These often correspond to the 'core' of a word that requires inflection or derivation to be valid.
Stem
Cohesion
Substitutability
Examples
azzi
2.30x
147 contexts
tazzi, yazzi, mazzi
izzi
2.03x
166 contexts
pizzi, rizzi, nizzi
itat
2.12x
103 contexts
citat, itati, vitatu
zion
2.21x
73 contexts
zione, zioni, azione
zzio
2.32x
44 contexts
zzioni, azziona, azzioni
vinc
2.14x
39 contexts
vinci, vincì, vince
iggi
1.65x
109 contexts
siggi, liggi, figgi
nali
1.91x
43 contexts
anali, linali, fanali
ncia
1.61x
80 contexts
uncia, ancia, lancia
lian
1.58x
70 contexts
julian, alianu, eliana
inci
1.46x
96 contexts
jinci, vinci, linci
ilia
1.52x
77 contexts
dilia, filia, iliadi
6.4 Affix Compatibility (Co-occurrence)
This table shows which prefixes and suffixes most frequently co-occur on the same stems, revealing the 'stacking' rules of the language's morphology.
Prefix
Suffix
Frequency
Examples
-c
-i
299 words
crudili, ciampi
-a
-i
257 words
arrisbigghiari, avvrazzari
-a
-u
247 words
albergu, arrinneru
-c
-u
225 words
colledimenzu, chiu
-c
-a
203 words
catilina, caldea
-s
-u
201 words
sassòfunu, suffru
-p
-i
200 words
pinitrari, picciriddi
-s
-i
200 words
sumenzi, sanguinari
-a
-a
157 words
adriatica, amatura
-m
-i
153 words
mustri, matrici
6.5 Recursive Morpheme Segmentation
Using Recursive Hierarchical Substitutability, we decompose complex words into their constituent morphemes. This approach handles nested affixes (e.g., prefix-prefix-root-suffix).
Word
Suggested Split
Confidence
Stem
eremitaggiu
eremitagg-i-u
7.5
i
intellighentsia
intellighents-i-a
7.5
i
impiegati
impieg-a-ti
7.5
a
gghiùnciri
gghiùnc-i-ri
7.5
i
cunsidiratu
cunsidir-a-tu
7.5
a
melitensis
melitens-i-s
7.5
i
nfruinzatu
nfruinz-a-tu
7.5
a
fortificata
fortific-a-ta
7.5
a
agghìunciri
agghìunc-i-ri
7.5
i
madeleine
madele-i-ne
7.5
i
munarchii
munarch-i-i
7.5
i
baudelaire
baudela-i-re
7.5
i
ndividuari
ndividu-a-ri
7.5
a
ncintivati
ncintiv-a-ti
7.5
a
vintagghiu
vintaggh-i-u
7.5
i
6.6 Linguistic Interpretation
Automated Insight:
The language Sicilian shows high morphological productivity. The subword models are significantly more efficient than word models, suggesting a rich system of affixation or compounding.
Note on Idiomaticity: The high Idiomaticity Gap suggests a large number of frequent multi-word expressions or formulaic sequences that are statistically distinct from their component parts.
7. Summary & Recommendations
Performance Dashboard
Production Recommendations
Component
Recommended
Rationale
Tokenizer
64k BPE
Best compression (4.49x)
N-gram
2-gram
Lowest perplexity (244)
Markov
Context-4
Highest predictability (97.1%)
Embeddings
100d
Balanced semantic capture and isotropy
Appendix: Metrics Glossary & Interpretation Guide
This section provides definitions, intuitions, and guidance for interpreting the metrics used throughout this report.
Tokenizer Metrics
Compression Ratio
Definition: The ratio of characters to tokens (chars/token). Measures how efficiently the tokenizer represents text.
Intuition: Higher compression means fewer tokens needed to represent the same text, reducing sequence lengths for downstream models. A 3x compression means ~3 characters per token on average.
What to seek: Higher is generally better for efficiency, but extremely high compression may indicate overly aggressive merging that loses morphological information.
Average Token Length (Fertility)
Definition: Mean number of characters per token produced by the tokenizer.
Intuition: Reflects the granularity of tokenization. Longer tokens capture more context but may struggle with rare words; shorter tokens are more flexible but increase sequence length.
What to seek: Balance between 2-5 characters for most languages. Arabic/morphologically-rich languages may benefit from slightly longer tokens.
Unknown Token Rate (OOV Rate)
Definition: Percentage of tokens that map to the unknown/UNK token, indicating words the tokenizer cannot represent.
Intuition: Lower OOV means better vocabulary coverage. High OOV indicates the tokenizer encounters many unseen character sequences.
What to seek: Below 1% is excellent; below 5% is acceptable. BPE tokenizers typically achieve very low OOV due to subword fallback.
N-gram Model Metrics
Perplexity
Definition: Measures how "surprised" the model is by test data. Mathematically: 2^(cross-entropy). Lower values indicate better prediction.
Intuition: If perplexity is 100, the model is as uncertain as if choosing uniformly among 100 options at each step. A perplexity of 10 means effectively choosing among 10 equally likely options.
What to seek: Lower is better. Perplexity decreases with larger n-grams (more context). Values vary widely by language and corpus size.
Entropy
Definition: Average information content (in bits) needed to encode the next token given the context. Related to perplexity: perplexity = 2^entropy.
Intuition: High entropy means high uncertainty/randomness; low entropy means predictable patterns. Natural language typically has entropy between 1-4 bits per character.
What to seek: Lower entropy indicates more predictable text patterns. Entropy should decrease as n-gram size increases.
Coverage (Top-K)
Definition: Percentage of corpus occurrences explained by the top K most frequent n-grams.
Intuition: High coverage with few patterns indicates repetitive/formulaic text; low coverage suggests diverse vocabulary usage.
What to seek: Depends on use case. For language modeling, moderate coverage (40-60% with top-1000) is typical for natural text.
Markov Chain Metrics
Average Entropy
Definition: Mean entropy across all contexts, measuring average uncertainty in next-word prediction.
Intuition: Lower entropy means the model is more confident about what comes next. Context-1 has high entropy (many possible next words); Context-4 has low entropy (few likely continuations).
What to seek: Decreasing entropy with larger context sizes. Very low entropy (<0.1) indicates highly deterministic transitions.
Branching Factor
Definition: Average number of unique next tokens observed for each context.
Intuition: High branching = many possible continuations (flexible but uncertain); low branching = few options (predictable but potentially repetitive).
What to seek: Branching factor should decrease with context size. Values near 1.0 indicate nearly deterministic chains.
Predictability
Definition: Derived metric: (1 - normalized_entropy) × 100%. Indicates how deterministic the model's predictions are.
Intuition: 100% predictability means the next word is always certain; 0% means completely random. Real text falls between these extremes.
What to seek: Higher predictability for text generation quality, but too high (>98%) may produce repetitive output.
Vocabulary & Zipf's Law Metrics
Zipf's Coefficient
Definition: The slope of the log-log plot of word frequency vs. rank. Zipf's law predicts this should be approximately -1.
Intuition: A coefficient near -1 indicates the corpus follows natural language patterns where a few words are very common and most words are rare.
What to seek: Values between -0.8 and -1.2 indicate healthy natural language distribution. Deviations may suggest domain-specific or artificial text.
R² (Coefficient of Determination)
Definition: Measures how well the linear fit explains the frequency-rank relationship. Ranges from 0 to 1.
Intuition: R² near 1.0 means the data closely follows Zipf's law; lower values indicate deviation from expected word frequency patterns.
What to seek: R² > 0.95 is excellent; > 0.99 indicates near-perfect Zipf adherence typical of large natural corpora.
Vocabulary Coverage
Definition: Cumulative percentage of corpus tokens accounted for by the top N words.
Intuition: Shows how concentrated word usage is. If top-100 words cover 50% of text, the corpus relies heavily on common words.
What to seek: Top-100 covering 30-50% is typical. Higher coverage indicates more repetitive text; lower suggests richer vocabulary.
Word Embedding Metrics
Isotropy
Definition: Measures how uniformly distributed vectors are in the embedding space. Computed as the ratio of minimum to maximum singular values.
Intuition: High isotropy (near 1.0) means vectors spread evenly in all directions; low isotropy means vectors cluster in certain directions, reducing expressiveness.
What to seek: Higher isotropy generally indicates better-quality embeddings. Values > 0.1 are reasonable; > 0.3 is good. Lower-dimensional embeddings tend to have higher isotropy.
Average Norm
Definition: Mean magnitude (L2 norm) of word vectors in the embedding space.
Intuition: Indicates the typical "length" of vectors. Consistent norms suggest stable training; high variance may indicate some words are undertrained.
What to seek: Relatively consistent norms across models. The absolute value matters less than consistency (low std deviation).
Cosine Similarity
Definition: Measures angular similarity between vectors, ranging from -1 (opposite) to 1 (identical direction).
Intuition: Words with similar meanings should have high cosine similarity. This is the standard metric for semantic relatedness in embeddings.
What to seek: Semantically related words should score > 0.5; unrelated words should be near 0. Synonyms often score > 0.7.
t-SNE Visualization
Definition: t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding - a dimensionality reduction technique that preserves local structure for visualization.
Intuition: Clusters in t-SNE plots indicate groups of semantically related words. Spread indicates vocabulary diversity; tight clusters suggest semantic coherence.
What to seek: Meaningful clusters (e.g., numbers together, verbs together). Avoid over-interpreting distances - t-SNE preserves local, not global, structure.
General Interpretation Guidelines
Compare within model families: Metrics are most meaningful when comparing models of the same type (e.g., 8k vs 64k tokenizer).
Consider trade-offs: Better performance on one metric often comes at the cost of another (e.g., compression vs. OOV rate).
Context matters: Optimal values depend on downstream tasks. Text generation may prioritize different metrics than classification.
Corpus influence: All metrics are influenced by corpus characteristics. Wikipedia text differs from social media or literature.
Language-specific patterns: Morphologically rich languages (like Arabic) may show different optimal ranges than analytic languages.
Visualizations Index
Visualization
Description
Tokenizer Compression
Compression ratios by vocabulary size
Tokenizer Fertility
Average token length by vocabulary
Tokenizer OOV
Unknown token rates
Tokenizer Total Tokens
Total tokens by vocabulary
N-gram Perplexity
Perplexity by n-gram size
N-gram Entropy
Entropy by n-gram size
N-gram Coverage
Top pattern coverage
N-gram Unique
Unique n-gram counts
Markov Entropy
Entropy by context size
Markov Branching
Branching factor by context
Markov Contexts
Unique context counts
Zipf's Law
Frequency-rank distribution with fit
Vocab Frequency
Word frequency distribution
Top 20 Words
Most frequent words
Vocab Coverage
Cumulative coverage curve
Embedding Isotropy
Vector space uniformity
Embedding Norms
Vector magnitude distribution
Embedding Similarity
Word similarity heatmap
Nearest Neighbors
Similar words for key terms
t-SNE Words
2D word embedding visualization
t-SNE Sentences
2D sentence embedding visualization
Position Encoding
Encoding method comparison
Model Sizes
Storage requirements
Performance Dashboard
Comprehensive performance overview
About This Project
Data Source
Models trained on wikipedia-monthly - a monthly snapshot of Wikipedia articles across 300+ languages.
Project
A project by Wikilangs - Open-source NLP models for every Wikipedia language.
