An enhanced text compression approach using transformer-based language models

Abstract

Text compression shrinks textual data while keeping crucial information, eradicating constraints on storage, band-width, and computational efficacy. The integration of lossless compression techniques with transformer-based text decompression has received negligible attention, despite the increasing volume of English text data in communication. The primary barrier in advancing text compression and restoration involves optimizing transformer-based approaches with efficient pre-processing and integrating lossless compression algorithms, that remained unresolved in the prior attempts. Here, we propose a transformer-based method named RejuvenateFormer for text decompression, addressing prior issues by harnessing a new pre-processing technique and a lossless compression method. Our meticulous pre-processing technique incorporating the Lempel-Ziv-Welch algorithm achieves compression ratios of 12.57, 13.38, and 11.42 on the BookCorpus, EN-DE, and EN-FR corpora, thus showing state-of-the-art compression ratios compared to other deep learning and traditional approaches. Furthermore, the RejuvenateFormer achieves a BLEU score of 27.31, 25.78, and 50.45 on the EN-DE, EN-FR, and BookCorpus corpora, showcasing its comprehensive efficacy. In contrast, the pre-trained T5-Small exhibits better performance over prior state-of-the-art models.