language: bbc
language_name: BBC
language_family: austronesian_batak
tags:
- wikilangs
- nlp
- tokenizer
- embeddings
- n-gram
- markov
- wikipedia
- monolingual
- family-austronesian_batak
license: mit
library_name: wikilangs
pipeline_tag: feature-extraction
datasets:
- omarkamali/wikipedia-monthly
dataset_info:
name: wikipedia-monthly
description: Monthly snapshots of Wikipedia articles across 300+ languages
metrics:
- name: best_compression_ratio
type: compression
value: 4.433
- name: best_isotropy
type: isotropy
value: 0.8253
- name: vocabulary_size
type: vocab
value: 24711
generated: 2025-12-28T00:00:00.000Z
BBC - Wikilangs Models
Comprehensive Research Report & Full Ablation Study
This repository contains NLP models trained and evaluated by Wikilangs, specifically on BBC Wikipedia data. We analyze tokenizers, n-gram models, Markov chains, vocabulary statistics, and word embeddings.
📋 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 | 3.867x | 3.83 | 0.1235% | 1,466,873 |
| 16k | 4.118x | 4.08 | 0.1315% | 1,377,727 |
| 32k | 4.304x | 4.27 | 0.1375% | 1,318,061 |
| 64k | 4.433x 🏆 | 4.39 | 0.1416% | 1,279,829 |
Tokenization Examples
Below are sample sentences tokenized with each vocabulary size:
Sample 1: Panjunan i ma sada huta na adong di Kecamatan Petarukan, Kabupaten Pemalang, Pr...
| Vocab | Tokens | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 8k | ▁panj unan ▁i ▁ma ▁sada ▁huta ▁na ▁adong ▁di ▁kecamatan ... (+11 more) |
21 |
| 16k | ▁panj unan ▁i ▁ma ▁sada ▁huta ▁na ▁adong ▁di ▁kecamatan ... (+11 more) |
21 |
| 32k | ▁panj unan ▁i ▁ma ▁sada ▁huta ▁na ▁adong ▁di ▁kecamatan ... (+11 more) |
21 |
| 64k | ▁panjunan ▁i ▁ma ▁sada ▁huta ▁na ▁adong ▁di ▁kecamatan ▁petarukan ... (+10 more) |
20 |
Sample 2: `Ampapaga (Surat Batak:ᯀᯔ᯲ᯇᯇᯎ) i ma sada suansuanan na tubu di gadu ni hauma.
P...`
| Vocab | Tokens | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 8k | ▁amp ap aga ▁( surat ▁batak : ᯀ ᯔ᯲ ᯇ ... (+20 more) |
30 |
| 16k | ▁amp ap aga ▁( surat ▁batak : ᯀ ᯔ᯲ᯇ ᯇ ... (+18 more) |
28 |
| 32k | ▁amp apaga ▁( surat ▁batak : ᯀ ᯔ᯲ᯇᯇᯎ ) ▁i ... (+15 more) |
25 |
| 64k | ▁ampapaga ▁( surat ▁batak : ᯀᯔ᯲ᯇᯇᯎ ) ▁i ▁ma ▁sada ... (+13 more) |
23 |
Sample 3: Sungapan i ma sada huta na adong di Kecamatan Pemalang, Kabupaten Pemalang, Pro...
| Vocab | Tokens | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 8k | ▁sung apan ▁i ▁ma ▁sada ▁huta ▁na ▁adong ▁di ▁kecamatan ... (+11 more) |
21 |
| 16k | ▁sung apan ▁i ▁ma ▁sada ▁huta ▁na ▁adong ▁di ▁kecamatan ... (+11 more) |
21 |
| 32k | ▁sung apan ▁i ▁ma ▁sada ▁huta ▁na ▁adong ▁di ▁kecamatan ... (+11 more) |
21 |
| 64k | ▁sungapan ▁i ▁ma ▁sada ▁huta ▁na ▁adong ▁di ▁kecamatan ▁pemalang ... (+10 more) |
20 |
Key Findings
- Best Compression: 64k achieves 4.433x compression
- Lowest UNK Rate: 8k with 0.1235% 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 | 7,191 🏆 | 12.81 | 30,496 | 17.8% | 49.6% |
| 2-gram | 209 🏆 | 7.70 | 2,868 | 75.2% | 99.1% |
| 3-gram | 25,989 | 14.67 | 62,993 | 8.7% | 26.3% |
| 3-gram | 1,399 | 10.45 | 19,851 | 36.8% | 80.6% |
| 4-gram | 63,619 | 15.96 | 114,847 | 4.7% | 15.6% |
| 4-gram | 6,375 | 12.64 | 81,359 | 18.9% | 52.8% |
Top 5 N-grams by Size
2-grams:
| Rank | N-gram | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | , jala |
8,780 |
| 2 | i , |
6,997 |
| 3 | ᯬ ᯲ |
4,573 |
| 4 | angka na |
4,409 |
| 5 | dung i |
4,328 |
3-grams:
| Rank | N-gram | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | anak ni si |
1,611 |
| 2 | , angka na |
1,528 |
| 3 | . 2 : |
1,079 |
| 4 | , anak ni |
1,069 |
| 5 | ᯰ ᯄ ᯦ |
1,063 |
4-grams:
| Rank | N-gram | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | , anak ni si |
906 |
| 2 | ᯀ ᯰ ᯄ ᯦ |
686 |
| 3 | ᯘ ᯪ ᯀᯉ ᯲ |
457 |
| 4 | ᯬ ᯂᯖ ᯬ ᯲ |
432 |
| 5 | on do hata ni |
421 |
Key Findings
- Best Perplexity: 2-gram with 209
- Entropy Trend: Decreases with larger n-grams (more predictable)
- Coverage: Top-1000 patterns cover ~53% 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 | 0.8281 | 1.775 | 6.09 | 50,531 | 17.2% |
| 1 | 1.0960 | 2.138 | 7.35 | 1,187 | 0.0% |
| 2 | 0.3983 | 1.318 | 2.17 | 307,642 | 60.2% |
| 2 | 0.8091 | 1.752 | 4.70 | 8,725 | 19.1% |
| 3 | 0.1982 | 1.147 | 1.41 | 667,901 | 80.2% |
| 3 | 0.7878 | 1.726 | 3.57 | 41,004 | 21.2% |
| 4 | 0.0988 🏆 | 1.071 | 1.16 | 943,940 | 90.1% |
| 4 | 0.5526 🏆 | 1.467 | 2.40 | 146,535 | 44.7% |
Generated Text Samples
Below are text samples generated from each Markov chain model:
Context Size 1:
, jala tu si wasti , jala dipadeakdeak hamu sian i jala peakkononna tu palaspalas pamurunan. 12 : songon i hatangku tu bagasan saluhut angka ari puasa bintang di jolo i: ida ma angka na margoar milo dohot paredangedangan , 2 : 35 : 25 pelean
Context Size 2:
, jala tudoshon gumora angka anak ni si joab soara ni sarune i laho ma ho ,i , naung pinauli ni tangan ni halak pangarupa umpogo upa ni pambahenannasida . 99 : 7ᯬ ᯲ ᯘᯞ ᯮ ᯂᯖ ᯮ ᯲ ᯑ ᯩ ᯇᯔ ᯲ ᯅᯂ ᯩ ᯉᯉ ᯲ ᯔ ᯉ
Context Size 3:
anak ni si ahilud do panuturi . 18 : 13 tung sura ahu parohon begu masa tu luat, angka na so bangso hian ; marhite sian bangso na asing , jala marbarita goarmu di betlehem. 2 : 15 alai tarrimas situtu ma si abner dohot di halak na marroha pangansion , ndang
Context Size 4:
, anak ni si ammiel . 3 : 6 ndada tu torop bangso , angka parhata bobang , manangᯀ ᯰ ᯄ ᯦ ᯂᯖ ᯉ ᯪ ᯘ ᯪ ᯅ ᯩ ᯀ ᯩ ᯒ ᯪ ᯑ ᯪ ᯉᯘ ᯪᯘ ᯪ ᯀᯉ ᯲ ᯂᯔ ᯪ ᯐ ᯮ ᯔ ᯬ ᯞ ᯬ ᯉ ᯪ ᯑ ᯩ ᯅᯖ 2 :
Key Findings
- Best Predictability: Context-4 with 90.1% predictability
- Branching Factor: Decreases with context size (more deterministic)
- Memory Trade-off: Larger contexts require more storage (146,535 contexts)
- Recommendation: Context-3 or Context-4 for text generation
4. Vocabulary Analysis
Statistics
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Vocabulary Size | 24,711 |
| Total Tokens | 1,019,541 |
| Mean Frequency | 41.26 |
| Median Frequency | 4 |
| Frequency Std Dev | 565.94 |
Most Common Words
| Rank | Word | Frequency |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | ni | 35,101 |
| 2 | na | 34,088 |
| 3 | i | 33,056 |
| 4 | ma | 26,769 |
| 5 | di | 26,053 |
| 6 | tu | 20,450 |
| 7 | do | 19,163 |
| 8 | angka | 17,428 |
| 9 | jala | 14,598 |
| 10 | dohot | 13,609 |
Least Common Words (from vocabulary)
| Rank | Word | Frequency |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | ᯝᯇᯞ | 2 |
| 2 | kayo | 2 |
| 3 | uttar | 2 |
| 4 | ltr | 2 |
| 5 | ebrima | 2 |
| 6 | 290px | 2 |
| 7 | td | 2 |
| 8 | height | 2 |
| 9 | 260px | 2 |
| 10 | 22251 | 2 |
Zipf's Law Analysis
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Zipf Coefficient | 1.1956 |
| R² (Goodness of Fit) | 0.996705 |
| Adherence Quality | excellent |
Coverage Analysis
| Top N Words | Coverage |
|---|---|
| Top 100 | 52.8% |
| Top 1,000 | 78.6% |
| Top 5,000 | 91.7% |
| Top 10,000 | 95.9% |
Key Findings
- Zipf Compliance: R²=0.9967 indicates excellent adherence to Zipf's law
- High Frequency Dominance: Top 100 words cover 52.8% of corpus
- Long Tail: 14,711 words needed for remaining 4.1% coverage
5. Word Embeddings Evaluation
Model Comparison
| Model | Vocab Size | Dimension | Avg Norm | Std Norm | Isotropy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| mono_32d | 15,079 | 32 | 3.458 | 0.818 | 0.8253 🏆 |
| mono_64d | 15,079 | 64 | 3.886 | 0.738 | 0.7641 |
| mono_128d | 15,079 | 128 | 4.143 | 0.691 | 0.4668 |
| embeddings_enhanced | 0 | 0 | 0.000 | 0.000 | 0.0000 |
Key Findings
- Best Isotropy: mono_32d with 0.8253 (more uniform distribution)
- Dimension Trade-off: Higher dimensions capture more semantics but reduce isotropy
- Vocabulary Coverage: All models cover 15,079 words
- Recommendation: 100d for balanced semantic capture and efficiency
6. Summary & Recommendations
Production Recommendations
| Component | Recommended | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Tokenizer | 32k BPE | Best compression (4.43x) with low UNK rate |
| N-gram | 5-gram | Lowest perplexity (209) |
| Markov | Context-4 | Highest predictability (90.1%) |
| 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) × 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.
R² (Coefficient of Determination)
Definition: Measures how well the linear fit explains the frequency-rank relationship. Ranges from 0 to 1.
Intuition: R² near 1.0 means the data closely follows Zipf's law; lower values indicate deviation from expected word frequency patterns.
What to seek: R² > 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
- 🌐 Website: wikilangs.org
- 🤗 Models: huggingface.co/wikilangs
- 📊 Data: wikipedia-monthly
- 👤 Author: Omar Kamali
Generated by Wikilangs Models Pipeline
Report Date: 2025-12-28 00:12:38











