We introduce three simple randomized variants of byte pair encoding (BPE) and
explore whether randomizing the selection of merge operations substantially
affects a downstream machine translation task. We focus on translation into
morphologically rich languages, hypothesizing that this task may show
sensitivity to the method of choosing subwords. Analysis using a Bayesian
linear model indicates that two of the variants perform nearly
indistinguishably compared to standard BPE while the other degrades performance
less than we anticipated. We conclude that although standard BPE is widely
used, there exists an interesting universe of potential variations on it worth
investigating. Our code is available at: this https URL

通过引入三种简单的随机字节对编码变体并探索选择合并操作的随机化是否显著影响下游机器翻译任务，我们的研究旨在翻译形态丰富的语言，使用贝叶斯线性模型分析表明，两种变体与标准 BPE 几乎没有区别，而另一种变体的性能降低小于预期。我们得出结论，虽然标准 BPE 被广泛使用，但存在一个值得研究的有趣方案的可能性变体宇宙。