Welsh - Wikilangs Models
Comprehensive Research Report & Full Ablation Study
This repository contains NLP models trained and evaluated by Wikilangs, specifically on Welsh Wikipedia data. We analyze tokenizers, n-gram models, Markov chains, vocabulary statistics, and word embeddings.
π Repository Contents
Models & Assets
- Tokenizers (8k, 16k, 32k, 64k)
- N-gram models (2, 3, 4-gram)
- Markov chains (context of 1, 2, 3 and 4)
- Subword N-gram and Markov chains
- Embeddings in various sizes and dimensions
- Language Vocabulary
- Language Statistics

Analysis and Evaluation
- 1. Tokenizer Evaluation
- 2. N-gram Model Evaluation
- 3. Markov Chain Evaluation
- 4. Vocabulary Analysis
- 5. Word Embeddings Evaluation
- 6. Summary & Recommendations
- Metrics Glossary
- Visualizations Index
1. Tokenizer Evaluation
Results
| Vocab Size | Compression | Avg Token Len | UNK Rate | Total Tokens |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8k | 2.890x | 2.85 | 0.0354% | 1,175,001 |
| 16k | 3.105x | 3.07 | 0.0380% | 1,093,811 |
| 32k | 3.264x | 3.22 | 0.0400% | 1,040,478 |
| 64k | 3.377x π | 3.33 | 0.0414% | 1,005,729 |
Tokenization Examples
Below are sample sentences tokenized with each vocabulary size:
Sample 1: Roedd Despoena (hefyd Despina) yn nymff oedd yn ferch i Boseidon a Demeter ym my...
| Vocab | Tokens | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 8k | βroedd βdes po ena β( h efyd βdes p ina ... (+26 more) |
36 |
| 16k | βroedd βdes po ena β( hefyd βdes p ina ) ... (+23 more) |
33 |
| 32k | βroedd βdes po ena β( hefyd βdesp ina ) βyn ... (+20 more) |
30 |
| 64k | βroedd βdes po ena β( hefyd βdesp ina ) βyn ... (+17 more) |
27 |
Sample 2: Gregg Township, Centre County, Pennsylvania Gregg Township, Union County, Pennsy...
| Vocab | Tokens | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 8k | βgreg g βtownship , βcent re βcounty , βpennsylvania βgreg ... (+7 more) |
17 |
| 16k | βgreg g βtownship , βcentre βcounty , βpennsylvania βgreg g ... (+6 more) |
16 |
| 32k | βgregg βtownship , βcentre βcounty , βpennsylvania βgregg βtownship , ... (+4 more) |
14 |
| 64k | βgregg βtownship , βcentre βcounty , βpennsylvania βgregg βtownship , ... (+4 more) |
14 |
Sample 3: `Ceir sawl Swydd Butte yn yr Unol Daleithiau:
Swydd Butte, Califfornia Swydd B...`
| Vocab | Tokens | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 8k | βceir βsawl βswydd βbutt e βyn βyr βunol βdaleithiau : ... (+16 more) |
26 |
| 16k | βceir βsawl βswydd βbutt e βyn βyr βunol βdaleithiau : ... (+16 more) |
26 |
| 32k | βceir βsawl βswydd βbutt e βyn βyr βunol βdaleithiau : ... (+16 more) |
26 |
| 64k | βceir βsawl βswydd βbutte βyn βyr βunol βdaleithiau : βswydd ... (+12 more) |
22 |
Key Findings
- Best Compression: 64k achieves 3.377x compression
- Lowest UNK Rate: 8k with 0.0354% unknown tokens
- Trade-off: Larger vocabularies improve compression but increase model size
- Recommendation: 32k vocabulary provides optimal balance for production use
2. N-gram Model Evaluation
Results
| N-gram | Perplexity | Entropy | Unique N-grams | Top-100 Coverage | Top-1000 Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2-gram | 14,574 π | 13.83 | 870,365 | 26.9% | 51.5% |
| 2-gram | 329 π | 8.36 | 17,053 | 62.3% | 99.0% |
| 3-gram | 35,282 | 15.11 | 1,913,384 | 21.8% | 43.7% |
| 3-gram | 2,419 | 11.24 | 127,945 | 27.9% | 70.4% |
| 4-gram | 69,076 | 16.08 | 3,444,441 | 17.0% | 37.6% |
| 4-gram | 10,383 | 13.34 | 705,121 | 18.5% | 47.3% |
Top 5 N-grams by Size
2-grams:
| Rank | N-gram | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | categori : |
1,494,932 |
| 2 | - 01 |
1,376,508 |
| 3 | : ffilmiau |
1,056,825 |
| 4 | 01 - |
688,052 |
| 5 | ' r |
677,131 |
3-grams:
| Rank | N-gram | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | categori : ffilmiau |
1,056,809 |
| 2 | - 01 - |
688,032 |
| 3 | 01 - 01 |
668,773 |
| 4 | unol daleithiau america |
448,243 |
| 5 | cyfeiriadau categori : |
227,847 |
4-grams:
| Rank | N-gram | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | - 01 - 01 |
668,772 |
| 2 | unol daleithiau america saesneg |
152,032 |
| 3 | gan gynnwys y canlynol |
142,457 |
| 4 | gynnwys y canlynol : |
142,446 |
| 5 | o ffilmiau gan gynnwys |
141,007 |
Key Findings
- Best Perplexity: 2-gram with 329
- Entropy Trend: Decreases with larger n-grams (more predictable)
- Coverage: Top-1000 patterns cover ~47% of corpus
- Recommendation: 4-gram or 5-gram for best predictive performance
3. Markov Chain Evaluation
Results
| Context | Avg Entropy | Perplexity | Branching Factor | Unique Contexts | Predictability |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0.7241 | 1.652 | 7.40 | 841,116 | 27.6% |
| 1 | 1.3771 | 2.597 | 9.31 | 5,659 | 0.0% |
| 2 | 0.4190 | 1.337 | 2.47 | 6,216,866 | 58.1% |
| 2 | 0.7856 | 1.724 | 5.09 | 52,646 | 21.4% |
| 3 | 0.1820 | 1.134 | 1.44 | 15,354,414 | 81.8% |
| 3 | 0.7948 | 1.735 | 4.45 | 267,808 | 20.5% |
| 4 | 0.0927 π | 1.066 | 1.20 | 22,160,397 | 90.7% |
| 4 | 0.7045 π | 1.630 | 3.44 | 1,190,900 | 29.5% |
Generated Text Samples
Below are text samples generated from each Markov chain model:
Context Size 1:
. ymosododd ar ddeg ysgrif ) eu brest . derbyniad gweler hefyd cyhoeddodd carlos roffΓ© ,- 01 ez naiz sbaen sbaeneg a ' w gael eu galw ' r ffilm gorey cyfarwyddwr ffilm ddrama gan gyfarwyddwyr ffilm maneater a chyfansoddwyd y deyrnas unedig saesneg ...
Context Size 2:
categori : ffilmiau 1968 categori : gwyddonwyr ffrengig categori : ffilmiau 2006 categori : ffilmiau...- 01 just in roseland . ar Γ΄l i weld ei thad wedi cyfaddef mewn u od: ffilmiau dogfen categori : ffilmiau saesneg wedi gweld golau dydd . cyfarwyddwr ganwyd y cyfarwydd...
Context Size 3:
categori : ffilmiau gyda llai na 10 o actorion lleisiol categori : ffilmiau comedi categori : dramΓ’u...- 01 - 01 jenatsch ffraincyr almaeny swistir almaenegportiwgalegsaesnegffrangeg 2018 - 05 - 15 prese...01 - 01 glamour y deyrnas unedig saesneg 1950 - 01 - 01 zero india 2018 - 01
Context Size 4:
- 01 - 01 la folie du doute ffrainc no / unknown value 1914 - 01 - 01 enunol daleithiau america saesneg 1977 - 01 - 01 who will marry me ? unol daleithiau america 1964 -gan gynnwys y canlynol : ffilm delwedd gwlad iaith wreiddiol dyddiad behind the scenes center | 100p...
Key Findings
- Best Predictability: Context-4 with 90.7% predictability
- Branching Factor: Decreases with context size (more deterministic)
- Memory Trade-off: Larger contexts require more storage (1,190,900 contexts)
- Recommendation: Context-3 or Context-4 for text generation
4. Vocabulary Analysis
Statistics
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Vocabulary Size | 389,645 |
| Total Tokens | 63,461,717 |
| Mean Frequency | 162.87 |
| Median Frequency | 5 |
| Frequency Std Dev | 8486.55 |
Most Common Words
| Rank | Word | Frequency |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | y | 2,296,979 |
| 2 | yn | 2,179,510 |
| 3 | o | 1,595,326 |
| 4 | categori | 1,496,135 |
| 5 | a | 1,393,254 |
| 6 | 01 | 1,383,521 |
| 7 | ffilmiau | 1,310,809 |
| 8 | ffilm | 1,218,970 |
| 9 | gan | 925,807 |
| 10 | r | 732,675 |
Least Common Words (from vocabulary)
| Rank | Word | Frequency |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | bulac | 2 |
| 2 | geirfaoedd | 2 |
| 3 | volcabulaire | 2 |
| 4 | ethnolog | 2 |
| 5 | siculu | 2 |
| 6 | metafonetig | 2 |
| 7 | defynydd | 2 |
| 8 | clwsterau | 2 |
| 9 | Εm | 2 |
| 10 | Εw | 2 |
Zipf's Law Analysis
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Zipf Coefficient | 1.2070 |
| RΒ² (Goodness of Fit) | 0.997118 |
| Adherence Quality | excellent |
Coverage Analysis
| Top N Words | Coverage |
|---|---|
| Top 100 | 48.9% |
| Top 1,000 | 73.9% |
| Top 5,000 | 85.7% |
| Top 10,000 | 89.6% |
Key Findings
- Zipf Compliance: RΒ²=0.9971 indicates excellent adherence to Zipf's law
- High Frequency Dominance: Top 100 words cover 48.9% of corpus
- Long Tail: 379,645 words needed for remaining 10.4% coverage
5. Word Embeddings Evaluation
Model Comparison
| Model | Vocab Size | Dimension | Avg Norm | Std Norm | Isotropy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| mono_32d | 302,236 | 32 | 4.313 | 1.212 | 0.8061 π |
| mono_64d | 302,236 | 64 | 4.810 | 1.191 | 0.7892 |
| mono_128d | 302,236 | 128 | 5.402 | 1.237 | 0.7570 |
| embeddings_enhanced | 0 | 0 | 0.000 | 0.000 | 0.0000 |
Key Findings
- Best Isotropy: mono_32d with 0.8061 (more uniform distribution)
- Dimension Trade-off: Higher dimensions capture more semantics but reduce isotropy
- Vocabulary Coverage: All models cover 302,236 words
- Recommendation: 100d for balanced semantic capture and efficiency
6. Summary & Recommendations
Production Recommendations
| Component | Recommended | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Tokenizer | 32k BPE | Best compression (3.38x) with low UNK rate |
| N-gram | 5-gram | Lowest perplexity (329) |
| Markov | Context-4 | Highest predictability (90.7%) |
| 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) Γ 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.
RΒ² (Coefficient of Determination)
Definition: Measures how well the linear fit explains the frequency-rank relationship. Ranges from 0 to 1.
Intuition: RΒ² near 1.0 means the data closely follows Zipf's law; lower values indicate deviation from expected word frequency patterns.
What to seek: RΒ² > 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.
Maintainer
Citation
If you use these models in your research, please cite:
@misc{wikilangs2025,
author = {Kamali, Omar},
title = {Wikilangs: Open NLP Models for Wikipedia Languages},
year = {2025},
publisher = {HuggingFace},
url = {https://huggingface.co/wikilangs}
institution = {Omneity Labs}
}
License
MIT License - Free for academic and commercial use.
Links
- π Website: wikilangs.org
- π€ Models: huggingface.co/wikilangs
- π Data: wikipedia-monthly
- π€ Author: Omar Kamali
Generated by Wikilangs Models Pipeline
Report Date: 2025-12-29 06:44:48











