TextEconomizer: Enhancing lossy text compression with denoising transformers and entropy coding

Lossy text compression reduces data size while preserving core meaning, making it well-suited for tasks like summarization, automated analysis, and digital archives where exact fidelity is less critical. Despite the dominance of transformer-based models in language modeling, the integration of context vectors and lossless entropy coding into Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) text generation remains underexplored. A key challenge lies in identifying the most informative context vectors from the encoder output and incorporating entropy coding into the transformer framework to enhance storage efficiency while maintaining high-quality outputs, even in the presence of noisy text. Previous studies have primarily focused on near-lossless token generation, often overlooking space efficiency. In this paper, we introduce TextEconomizer, an encoder-decoder framework paired with a transformer neural network. This framework utilizes its latent representation to reduce variable-sized inputs by 50% to 80%, without prior knowledge of dataset dimensions. Our model achieves competitive compression ratios by incorporating entropy coding, while delivering near-perfect text quality, as assessed by Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU), Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation (ROUGE), Metric for Evaluation of Translation with Explicit ORdering (METEOR), and semantic similarity scores. Notably, TextEconomizer operates with approximately 153 times fewer parameters than comparable models, achieving a compression ratio of 5.39 ×  without sacrificing semantic quality. Additionally, we evaluate our framework by implementing a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)-based autoencoder, commonly used in image compression, and by integrating advanced modules within the transformer architecture as alternatives to conventional techniques. Our autoencoder achieves a state-of-the-art compression ratio of 67 ×  with 196 times fewer parameters, while our modified transformer, LLaMAFormer, achieves a 263-fold reduction in parameters compared to ICAE while maintaining competitive text quality. The TextEconomizer framework significantly surpasses existing transformer-based models in balancing memory efficiency and high-fidelity outputs, marking a breakthrough in lossy compression with optimal space utilization.