I'm just an observer to the space, but I imagine each chinese character (or each word) being a token would be pretty effective, especially as inputting/outputting more tokens requires more vram. Additionally Chinese doesn't have conjugations which I imagine makes tokenization easier.
I think it's easier to connect semantic meaning between these tokens/charcaters, because you can relate a character to other characters by their presence in words (most words are 2 characters long (compound words), although there are sometimes words like AB and BC which mean the same thing, but in conversations people will just say A or C and the meaning (AB or BC) is inferred by the context of the conversation, so in a semantic meaning database you would want a connection between A and AB, and to BC & C). You could also have a dimension for each radical that isn't a phonetic component. Radicals do link vaguely related words together, and I think this is a powerful language feature missing in English that could be exploited in the NLP field.
I'm not a fluent or proficient speaker, so maybe I'm not the best person to explain things, but before OpenAI's Whisper, speech-to-text in WeChat in Mandarin was way better than any English speech-to-text I've ever used. The structure of the Chinese language and its large userbase would make me bet long on Chinese NLP progress over the west.
I think it's easier to connect semantic meaning between these tokens/charcaters, because you can relate a character to other characters by their presence in words (most words are 2 characters long (compound words), although there are sometimes words like AB and BC which mean the same thing, but in conversations people will just say A or C and the meaning (AB or BC) is inferred by the context of the conversation, so in a semantic meaning database you would want a connection between A and AB, and to BC & C). You could also have a dimension for each radical that isn't a phonetic component. Radicals do link vaguely related words together, and I think this is a powerful language feature missing in English that could be exploited in the NLP field.
I'm not a fluent or proficient speaker, so maybe I'm not the best person to explain things, but before OpenAI's Whisper, speech-to-text in WeChat in Mandarin was way better than any English speech-to-text I've ever used. The structure of the Chinese language and its large userbase would make me bet long on Chinese NLP progress over the west.