arXiv cs.CL· Herman Kamper·· 10 小时前AI 评分26
音素、音节与词：哪种语言单元的信息率最低？
On the information rate of phones, syllables and words
AI 导读
一项基于 960 小时英文有声书转写语料的研究比较了音素、音节、词、多词组合及中间切分单元的信息率，在 n-gram 与 Transformer 语言模型的有限建模预算下，词取得最低比特率，稍长的单元有时表现最佳。结果表明建模容量受限时，大于音节但短于长多词短语的单元在信息率上表示效率最高。
正文 · 原文
Abstract: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.
| Comments: | 5 pages, 1 table, 2 figures |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2611.13990 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2611.13990v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2611.13990 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) |
Submission history
From: Herman Kamper [view email]
[v1]
Tue, 10 Nov 2026 12:33:12 UTC (63 KB)
来源：arXiv cs.CL · arxiv.org