German - Wikilangs Models
Comprehensive Research Report & Full Ablation Study
This repository contains NLP models trained and evaluated by Wikilangs, specifically on German 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 | 3.507x | 3.49 | 0.1233% | 8,236,556 |
| 16k | 3.844x | 3.82 | 0.1351% | 7,514,344 |
| 32k | 4.144x | 4.12 | 0.1457% | 6,969,900 |
| 64k | 4.386x π | 4.36 | 0.1541% | 6,586,435 |
Tokenization Examples
Below are sample sentences tokenized with each vocabulary size:
Sample 1: `Sezemitz bzw. Sesemitz bezeichnet
die Stadt Sezemice nad LouΔnou, Tschechien ...`
| Vocab | Tokens | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 8k | βse z em itz βbzw . βs es em itz ... (+36 more) |
46 |
| 16k | βse z em itz βbzw . βs es em itz ... (+33 more) |
43 |
| 32k | βse zem itz βbzw . βses em itz βbezeichnet βdie ... (+27 more) |
37 |
| 64k | βse zem itz βbzw . βses em itz βbezeichnet βdie ... (+26 more) |
36 |
Sample 2: `Schillen ist der Name folgender Person:
Ida Schillen (* 1956), deutsche Politi...`
| Vocab | Tokens | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 8k | βsch illen βist βder βname βfolgender βperson : βi da ... (+21 more) |
31 |
| 16k | βsch illen βist βder βname βfolgender βperson : βi da ... (+20 more) |
30 |
| 32k | βsch illen βist βder βname βfolgender βperson : βida βsch ... (+19 more) |
29 |
| 64k | βsch illen βist βder βname βfolgender βperson : βida βsch ... (+19 more) |
29 |
Sample 3: `BΔltΔreΘi ist der Name mehrerer Orte in RumΓ€nien:
BΔltΔreΘi (BuzΔu), Dorf im K...`
| Vocab | Tokens | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 8k | βb Δ lt Δ re Θ i βist βder βname ... (+47 more) |
57 |
| 16k | βb Δ lt Δ re Θ i βist βder βname ... (+45 more) |
55 |
| 32k | βb Δ lt Δ re Θ i βist βder βname ... (+45 more) |
55 |
| 64k | βb Δ lt Δ re Θ i βist βder βname ... (+44 more) |
54 |
Key Findings
- Best Compression: 64k achieves 4.386x compression
- Lowest UNK Rate: 8k with 0.1233% 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 | 397,539 π | 18.60 | 14,975,925 | 8.9% | 20.8% |
| 2-gram | 330 π | 8.37 | 56,875 | 63.2% | 98.5% |
| 3-gram | 4,321,490 | 22.04 | 46,313,184 | 3.0% | 7.5% |
| 3-gram | 3,011 | 11.56 | 458,754 | 25.3% | 66.1% |
| 4-gram | 16,869,913 | 24.01 | 94,033,907 | 1.7% | 4.3% |
| 4-gram | 18,869 | 14.20 | 3,362,393 | 12.7% | 36.5% |
Top 5 N-grams by Size
2-grams:
| Rank | N-gram | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | kategorie : |
6,792,008 |
| 2 | ) , |
4,653,717 |
| 3 | in der |
3,680,160 |
| 4 | . die |
3,639,368 |
| 5 | , die |
3,186,807 |
3-grams:
| Rank | N-gram | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | , s . |
2,005,174 |
| 2 | ) kategorie : |
1,889,059 |
| 3 | . in : |
957,571 |
| 4 | isbn 3 - |
658,242 |
| 5 | einzelnachweise kategorie : |
655,352 |
4-grams:
| Rank | N-gram | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | , isbn 3 - |
601,963 |
| 2 | , isbn 978 - |
507,252 |
| 3 | ( hrsg . ) |
456,446 |
| 4 | 978 - 3 - |
454,406 |
| 5 | isbn 978 - 3 |
452,207 |
Key Findings
- Best Perplexity: 2-gram with 330
- Entropy Trend: Decreases with larger n-grams (more predictable)
- Coverage: Top-1000 patterns cover ~37% 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 | 0.8229 | 1.769 | 11.84 | 11,563,865 | 17.7% |
| 1 | 0.3027 | 1.233 | 3.76 | 97,717 | 69.7% |
| 2 | 0.4537 | 1.370 | 3.19 | 136,857,243 | 54.6% |
| 2 | 0.4680 | 1.383 | 3.48 | 367,392 | 53.2% |
| 3 | 0.2356 | 1.177 | 1.69 | 435,861,393 | 76.4% |
| 3 | 0.6899 | 1.613 | 4.59 | 1,279,274 | 31.0% |
| 4 | 0.1157 π | 1.084 | 1.25 | 735,113,439 | 88.4% |
| 4 | 0.7766 π | 1.713 | 4.12 | 5,873,337 | 22.3% |
Generated Text Samples
Below are text samples generated from each Markov chain model:
Context Size 1:
. - richemont - hot 100 quadratkilometer , welche einflΓΌsse wie beispielsweise in verbreitung ist ,, s . nach 1945 - us navy siehe auch niklaas c2 und mΓΌhevollen aufbau befindlichender partei chinas grΓΆΓenwahn und kunstgewerbeschule zΓΌrich erschienenen faksimile β ( landkreis gibt...
Context Size 2:
kategorie : autor kategorie : deutscher kategorie : mediziner ( 20 . rang schweizer cup und den) , haselmusch ( pongau , salzburg u . a . glienke : die etwa drei weiherin der die wache sowie geschΓ€tzt 7 , 5 β 6 ( 0 , 0554 6 +
Context Size 3:
, s . 296 widmete ihr die vehbi koΓ§ foundation contemporary art collection . the magazine of fantasy) kategorie : wΓ€rmekennwert kategorie : messgrΓΆΓe ( abwasserbehandlung ) kategorie : trΓ€ger der army.... in : der tagesspiegel , 13 . juli 1267 , tochter von luigi vittorio bertarelli ( 1859
Context Size 4:
, isbn 3 - 930167 - 61 - 1 , s . 179 . untersuchungen und dokumentationen , die, isbn 978 - 3 - 00 - 000367 - 7 . wilfried seeba ( fΓΌr das landesmuseum oldenburg( hrsg . ) : erwin piscator . das politische theater . ein kommentar . verlag schnell & steiner
Key Findings
- Best Predictability: Context-4 with 88.4% predictability
- Branching Factor: Decreases with context size (more deterministic)
- Memory Trade-off: Larger contexts require more storage (5,873,337 contexts)
- Recommendation: Context-3 or Context-4 for text generation
4. Vocabulary Analysis
Statistics
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Vocabulary Size | 1,000,000 |
| Total Tokens | 970,645,273 |
| Mean Frequency | 970.65 |
| Median Frequency | 50 |
| Frequency Std Dev | 60089.51 |
Most Common Words
| Rank | Word | Frequency |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | der | 31,690,610 |
| 2 | und | 23,476,283 |
| 3 | die | 22,916,244 |
| 4 | in | 19,437,122 |
| 5 | von | 12,408,327 |
| 6 | im | 9,096,641 |
| 7 | des | 8,632,745 |
| 8 | den | 8,213,258 |
| 9 | mit | 7,476,726 |
| 10 | das | 6,990,663 |
Least Common Words (from vocabulary)
| Rank | Word | Frequency |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | flugzeugfertigung | 18 |
| 2 | erzgebirgsklinikum | 18 |
| 3 | kayoru | 18 |
| 4 | sumino | 18 |
| 5 | flΓΌssigkeitskupplung | 18 |
| 6 | 02599 | 18 |
| 7 | purvaranga | 18 |
| 8 | piassava | 18 |
| 9 | domenick | 18 |
| 10 | artentstehung | 18 |
Zipf's Law Analysis
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Zipf Coefficient | 1.0172 |
| RΒ² (Goodness of Fit) | 0.998135 |
| Adherence Quality | excellent |
Coverage Analysis
| Top N Words | Coverage |
|---|---|
| Top 100 | 35.0% |
| Top 1,000 | 55.9% |
| Top 5,000 | 71.4% |
| Top 10,000 | 77.6% |
Key Findings
- Zipf Compliance: RΒ²=0.9981 indicates excellent adherence to Zipf's law
- High Frequency Dominance: Top 100 words cover 35.0% of corpus
- Long Tail: 990,000 words needed for remaining 22.4% coverage
5. Word Embeddings Evaluation
Model Comparison
| Model | Vocab Size | Dimension | Avg Norm | Std Norm | Isotropy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| mono_32d | 4,270,148 | 32 | 3.020 | 0.882 | 0.7104 π |
| mono_64d | 4,270,148 | 64 | 3.422 | 0.855 | 0.6896 |
| mono_128d | 4,270,148 | 128 | 3.801 | 0.852 | 0.6174 |
| embeddings_enhanced | 0 | 0 | 0.000 | 0.000 | 0.0000 |
Key Findings
- Best Isotropy: mono_32d with 0.7104 (more uniform distribution)
- Dimension Trade-off: Higher dimensions capture more semantics but reduce isotropy
- Vocabulary Coverage: All models cover 4,270,148 words
- Recommendation: 100d for balanced semantic capture and efficiency
6. Summary & Recommendations
Production Recommendations
| Component | Recommended | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Tokenizer | 32k BPE | Best compression (4.39x) with low UNK rate |
| N-gram | 5-gram | Lowest perplexity (330) |
| Markov | Context-4 | Highest predictability (88.4%) |
| 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: 2025-12-30 08:16:31











