← 研踪 PaperTrailarXiv:2611.13990 · v1
On the information rate of phones, syllables and words
首次提交 2026-11-10 20:33
版本更新 2026-11-10 20:33
雷达观测 2026-11-11 11:04
摘要
Which linguistic units minimise the bitrate required to encode speech content: phones, syllables, words, maybe larger units, or something in between? This question has implications for the development of speech and language systems and theories of human language processing. Using a transcribed corpus of 960 hours of English audiobooks, I compare the information rates of phones, syllables, words, multi-word combinations and intermediate tokenisations. While all units are equivalent under a perfect language model, it makes sense to compare these under limited modelling budgets; I use $n$-gram and transformer language models. The lowest bitrates are achieved using words, with slightly longer units sometimes performing best. The results show that, when modelling capacity is limited, units larger than syllables but smaller than long multi-word phrases provide the most efficient representation in terms of information rate.
作者备注：5 pages, 1 table, 2 figures
观测到的版本
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v1 · 2026-11-10 20:33 · 最新观测版本
On the information rate of phones, syllables and words
Which linguistic units minimise the bitrate required to encode speech content: phones, syllables, words, maybe larger units, or something in between? This question has implications for the development of speech and language systems and theories of human language processing. Using a transcribed corpus of 960 hours of English audiobooks, I compare the information rates of phones, syllables, words, multi-word combinations and intermediate tokenisations. While all units are equivalent under a perfect language model, it makes sense to compare these under limited modelling budgets; I use $n$-gram and transformer language models. The lowest bitrates are achieved using words, with slightly longer units sometimes performing best. The results show that, when modelling capacity is limited, units larger than syllables but smaller than long multi-word phrases provide the most efficient representation in terms of information rate.
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