The minimal semantic parts of words are morphemes. Syllables are phonological units (roughly: the minimal unit for rhythmic purposes such as stress, etc)
Only in languages that have morphemes! This is hardly a universal attribute of language so much as an attribute of those that use an alphabet to encode sounds. It makes more sense to just bypass the encoding and directly consider the speech.
Besides, considering morphemes as semantic often results in a completely different meaning than we actually intend. We aren't trying to train a chatbot to speak in prefixes and suffixes, we're trying to train a chatbot to speak in natural language, even if it is encoded to latin script before output.
That's technically wrong. Every language has morphemes for the simple reason that every word is at least one morpheme. `cat` is a morpheme. `cats` is two morphemes (cat-s).
(The point about semantics is also technically wrong. You would first need to specify your view of semantic compositionality before such a point can be evaluated, but the usual views of semantics don't have any such consequence.)
darby_eight|1 year ago
Besides, considering morphemes as semantic often results in a completely different meaning than we actually intend. We aren't trying to train a chatbot to speak in prefixes and suffixes, we're trying to train a chatbot to speak in natural language, even if it is encoded to latin script before output.
inbetween|1 year ago
(The point about semantics is also technically wrong. You would first need to specify your view of semantic compositionality before such a point can be evaluated, but the usual views of semantics don't have any such consequence.)