What's the best way to handle out-of-vocabulary words in NLP models?
Asked on Nov 06, 2025
Answer
Handling out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words is a common challenge in NLP models, and there are several strategies to address this issue effectively. One popular approach is using subword tokenization, which breaks words into smaller units that are more likely to be in the vocabulary.
Example Concept: Subword tokenization involves splitting words into smaller, meaningful units called subwords. Techniques like Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) or WordPiece are used to create these subwords, allowing the model to handle OOV words by representing them as a combination of known subwords. This approach reduces the vocabulary size while maintaining the ability to understand and generate words not seen during training.
Additional Comment:
- Subword tokenization helps in reducing the number of OOV words by breaking them into known subword units.
- It allows the model to generalize better by understanding parts of words, which can be recombined to form new words.
- Other methods include using character-level models or embeddings, which consider words as sequences of characters.
- Pre-trained embeddings like FastText also handle OOV words by leveraging subword information.
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