Comprehensive Research Report & Full Ablation Study
This repository contains NLP models trained and evaluated by Wikilangs, specifically on Wolof 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
9,913
13.28
21,313
12.7%
36.9%
2-gram
Subword
263 🏆
8.04
2,618
68.3%
99.2%
3-gram
Word
53,177
15.70
71,583
3.9%
12.9%
3-gram
Subword
2,089
11.03
17,992
26.5%
74.1%
4-gram
Word
122,855
16.91
135,374
1.5%
4.7%
4-gram
Subword
11,307
13.46
78,032
12.0%
38.9%
5-gram
Word
127,965
16.97
134,813
0.9%
3.0%
5-gram
Subword
39,248
15.26
182,915
6.0%
23.4%
Top 5 N-grams by Size
2-grams (Word):
Rank
N-gram
Count
1
xam ne
1,468
2
na ci
1,268
3
yi ci
1,216
4
gën a
1,163
5
xam xam
1,152
3-grams (Word):
Rank
N-gram
Count
1
nga xam ne
1,027
2
bokk na ci
471
3
bu ko defee
451
4
yu mag yi
235
5
lëkkalekaay yu biti
230
4-grams (Word):
Rank
N-gram
Count
1
yi nga xam ne
207
2
bi j y m
156
3
from the original on
125
4
ak delluwaay lëkkalekaay yu
119
5
delluwaay lëkkalekaay yu biti
119
5-grams (Word):
Rank
N-gram
Count
1
karmat ak delluwaay lëkkalekaay yu
119
2
ak delluwaay lëkkalekaay yu biti
119
3
archived from the original on
103
4
yonnant bi j y m
94
5
de wikipédia avec notice d
66
2-grams (Subword):
Rank
N-gram
Count
1
i _
107,629
2
u _
77,269
3
a _
63,166
4
_ n
58,031
5
a a
56,077
3-grams (Subword):
Rank
N-gram
Count
1
_ c i
35,175
2
c i _
33,981
3
_ n a
17,142
4
_ a k
15,769
5
a k _
15,662
4-grams (Subword):
Rank
N-gram
Count
1
_ c i _
33,053
2
_ a k _
14,628
3
o o n _
11,321
4
_ k o _
9,009
5
_ y i _
8,939
5-grams (Subword):
Rank
N-gram
Count
1
i _ c i _
3,876
2
_ n e k k
3,635
3
_ m o o m
3,495
4
_ w o o n
3,436
5
m o o y _
3,277
Key Findings
Best Perplexity: 2-gram (subword) with 263
Entropy Trend: Decreases with larger n-grams (more predictable)
Coverage: Top-1000 patterns cover ~23% 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
0.8104
1.754
5.71
40,525
19.0%
1
Subword
1.2572
2.390
9.28
630
0.0%
2
Word
0.2934
1.226
1.70
230,646
70.7%
2
Subword
0.9933
1.991
5.75
5,840
0.7%
3
Word
0.0951
1.068
1.15
392,178
90.5%
3
Subword
0.8004
1.742
3.76
33,559
20.0%
4
Word
0.0328 🏆
1.023
1.04
450,681
96.7%
4
Subword
0.6046
1.521
2.58
126,072
39.5%
Generated Text Samples (Word-based)
Below are text samples generated from each word-based Markov chain model:
Context Size 1:
ci tariixa xaadiriya ci waxtub xër dafa yem diwam bokk na tudde wenn waxambaane tegi tànkam
ak yu gàtti dig lu jëkk moo taxoon seex ibraahima mbeng nekkoon seen diggante loolu yërmande
yi ci wolof mi am ci li moo doon jëfandikoo rawatina nag ag jiital tudd naa
Context Size 2:
xam ne day leeral li waa espaañ ak holand ànd ak xol asaf naa nag ñu doon
na ci diggante askan yeek seeni goornamaa loolu tam dooleel bennoo gu almaañ gi ñu dugal ko
yi ci tugal bu yees bii tay goornamaay tugal yi ci ngérum tàggat dajale leen du nu
Context Size 3:
nga xam ne danuy sukkandiku ci li nekk ci ginnaaw tawaaful qudoom te jokk ci su dee ajkat
bokk na ci mbootaay yu bari oif au cedeao ak ñoom seen te jumtukaay yi muy jëfandikoo amuñu
bu ko defee mu song ko ca tripoli gu soww ga atum daal di fas kollareg litofski gi
Context Size 4:
yi nga xam ne xareb adduna bu njëkk bi yëgoon nanu ne danu leen a xañoon itaali ca ndajem
bi j y m mas naa teew bis kenn ci boroom xam xam yi nag li gën a lëng
from the original on retrieved bu ci melni bu polio bi bobu wane na ni ay ndaw mën nañ
Generated Text Samples (Subword-based)
Below are text samples generated from each subword-based Markov chain model:
Context Size 1:
_tonnde_m_jiy_cà
aakonckku_ko_ten
i,_amen_ci-jëmee
Context Size 2:
i_de_we_doon_saak
u_aki_aji_lu_mu_m
a_konaal_nekk_ye_
Context Size 3:
_ci_na_bindikoonan
ci_niou,_lool_bind
_na_bi_ci_seere_ni
Context Size 4:
_ci_jii_nag_mbëj,_m
_ak_wu_jéggi,nekk_c
oon_à_l'emmeel_bi,_
Key Findings
Best Predictability: Context-4 (word) with 96.7% predictability
Branching Factor: Decreases with context size (more deterministic)
Memory Trade-off: Larger contexts require more storage (126,072 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
21,320
Total Tokens
669,546
Mean Frequency
31.40
Median Frequency
4
Frequency Std Dev
356.08
Most Common Words
Rank
Word
Frequency
1
ci
34,235
2
ak
15,534
3
yi
12,854
4
ko
10,384
5
bi
10,094
6
di
8,275
7
mu
7,957
8
bu
7,472
9
na
7,210
10
yu
6,832
Least Common Words (from vocabulary)
Rank
Word
Frequency
1
kapi
2
2
aicha
2
3
fassou
2
4
sagno
2
5
rugby
2
6
souaré
2
7
yéro
2
8
guinéenne
2
9
kandet
2
10
diawara
2
Zipf's Law Analysis
Metric
Value
Zipf Coefficient
1.2143
R² (Goodness of Fit)
0.993629
Adherence Quality
excellent
Coverage Analysis
Top N Words
Coverage
Top 100
46.2%
Top 1,000
76.0%
Top 5,000
91.1%
Top 10,000
95.7%
Key Findings
Zipf Compliance: R²=0.9936 indicates excellent adherence to Zipf's law
High Frequency Dominance: Top 100 words cover 46.2% of corpus
Long Tail: 11,320 words needed for remaining 4.3% 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
0.8649 🏆
0.3602
N/A
N/A
mono_64d
64
0.7358
0.2985
N/A
N/A
mono_128d
128
0.2553
0.2614
N/A
N/A
aligned_32d
32
0.8649
0.3643
0.0160
0.1220
aligned_64d
64
0.7358
0.3085
0.0280
0.2040
aligned_128d
128
0.2553
0.2646
0.0560
0.2420
Key Findings
Best Isotropy: mono_32d with 0.8649 (more uniform distribution)
Semantic Density: Average pairwise similarity of 0.3096. Lower values indicate better semantic separation.
Alignment Quality: Aligned models achieve up to 5.6% 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
-0.871
Low formulaic 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
saytuloo, saws, sayyidimaa
-a
andis, afc, aamustrong
-m
magellan, mujjam, médecine
-b
bërëp, bàyyiwoon, bashiir
-d
dammte, dadi, dimbale
-n
natoo, notee, nationale
-t
tv, tenqam, tóoru
-ma
magellan, mar, maritime
Productive Suffixes
Suffix
Examples
-e
xiirtalante, relatée, notee
-n
bàyyiwoon, chemin, magellan
-i
lakkati, rakki, parti
-l
wiccal, ñenteel, jërul
-a
jola, keita, sayyidimaa
-u
gondiku, tóoru, sosu
-s
andis, saws, joxees
-on
bàyyiwoon, àndutoon, interprétation
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
tion
2.39x
17 contexts
nation, notion, option
oroo
1.98x
29 contexts
loroo, joroom, woroom
enee
2.00x
26 contexts
benee, weneen, yéenee
ante
1.77x
39 contexts
dante, kante, wante
maan
1.65x
41 contexts
maang, maane, maana
araa
1.42x
65 contexts
araab, saraa, araam
raan
1.70x
29 contexts
iraan, xiraan, fraans
àlla
1.77x
25 contexts
yàlla, wàlla, àllaa
oole
1.66x
27 contexts
doole, boole, xoole
aari
1.56x
33 contexts
yaari, naari, baari
afri
2.06x
13 contexts
afric, afrig, afrik
kkoo
1.52x
34 contexts
dàkkoo, jokkoo, sàkkoo
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
-s
-e
55 words
secondaire, seete
-m
-e
46 words
mbusóobe, matiere
-d
-e
43 words
dofe, dikke
-m
-a
42 words
miimiya, maginta
-t
-e
40 words
toogee, tëjee
-m
-i
39 words
maymooni, mai
-m
-n
38 words
mbàmbullaan, muttaquun
-t
-n
36 words
telefon, tëjoon
-a
-i
35 words
asi, almeeri
-m
-m
34 words
mycobacterium, muurum
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
mokkalloo
mokkal-l-oo
7.5
l
ulaayikal
ulaayi-k-al
7.5
k
politigkat
politig-k-at
7.5
k
ndokkeelsi
ndokkeel-s-i
7.5
s
endustreem
endustr-e-em
7.5
e
rafetatul
rafet-at-ul
6.0
rafet
terewuloon
terewul-o-on
6.0
terewul
serigneum
serigne-u-m
6.0
serigne
ahmadubnu
ahmad-ub-nu
6.0
ahmad
séddaleeb
séddalee-b
4.5
séddalee
siyaareem
siyaaree-m
4.5
siyaaree
kolombiya
kolombi-ya
4.5
kolombi
detection
de-te-ction
4.5
ction
jubluwunu
jubluwu-nu
4.5
jubluwu
melosuufug
melosuuf-ug
4.5
melosuuf
6.6 Linguistic Interpretation
Automated Insight:
The language Wolof shows high morphological productivity. The subword models are significantly more efficient than word models, suggesting a rich system of affixation or compounding.
7. Summary & Recommendations
Performance Dashboard
Production Recommendations
Component
Recommended
Rationale
Tokenizer
32k BPE
Best compression (3.83x)
N-gram
2-gram
Lowest perplexity (263)
Markov
Context-4
Highest predictability (96.7%)
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.
