BPEmb: Tokenization-free Pre-trained Subword Embeddings in 275 Languages

Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

Abstract

We present BPEmb, a collection of pre-trained subword unit embeddings in 275 languages, based on Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE). In an evaluation using fine-grained entity typing as testbed, BPEmb performs competitively, and for some languages better than alternative subword approaches, while requiring vastly fewer resources and no tokenization. BPEmb is available at https://github.com/bheinzerling/bpemb.