Related papers: Learning variable length units for SMT between rel…
Byte-pair encoding (BPE) is a ubiquitous algorithm in the subword tokenization process of language models as it provides multiple benefits. However, this process is solely based on pre-training data statistics, making it hard for the…
A major consideration in multilingual language modeling is how to best represent languages with diverse vocabularies and scripts. Although contemporary text encoding methods cover most of the world's writing systems, they exhibit bias…
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) in low-resource settings and of morphologically rich languages is made difficult in part by data sparsity of vocabulary words. Several methods have been used to help reduce this sparsity, notably Byte-Pair…
This paper introduces Dynamic Programming Encoding (DPE), a new segmentation algorithm for tokenizing sentences into subword units. We view the subword segmentation of output sentences as a latent variable that should be marginalized out…
We propose a generalization of neural network sequence models. Instead of predicting one symbol at a time, our multi-scale model makes predictions over multiple, potentially overlapping multi-symbol tokens. A variation of the byte-pair…
We propose a language-independent approach for improving statistical machine translation for morphologically rich languages using a hybrid morpheme-word representation where the basic unit of translation is the morpheme, but word boundaries…
We present two end-to-end models: Audio-to-Byte (A2B) and Byte-to-Audio (B2A), for multilingual speech recognition and synthesis. Prior work has predominantly used characters, sub-words or words as the unit of choice to model text. These…
Tokenization is the act of breaking down text into smaller parts, or tokens, that are easier for machines to process. This is a key phase in machine translation (MT) models. Subword tokenization enhances this process by breaking down words…
Subword segmentation is widely used to address the open vocabulary problem in machine translation. The dominant approach to subword segmentation is Byte Pair Encoding (BPE), which keeps the most frequent words intact while splitting the…
In this work, we leverage the intrinsic segmentation of language sequences and design a new positional encoding method called Bilevel Positional Encoding (BiPE). For each position, our BiPE blends an intra-segment encoding and an…
Byte-based machine translation systems have shown significant potential in massively multilingual settings. Unicode encoding, which maps each character to specific byte(s), eliminates the emergence of unknown words, even in new languages.…
The state of the art of handling rich morphology in neural machine translation (NMT) is to break word forms into subword units, so that the overall vocabulary size of these units fits the practical limits given by the NMT model and GPU…
Tokenization is a foundational step in natural language processing (NLP) tasks, bridging raw text and language models. Existing tokenization approaches like Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) originate from the field of data compression, and it has…
We present a large-scale comparative study of 242 Latin and Cyrillic-script languages using subword-based methodologies. By constructing 'glottosets' from Wikipedia lexicons, we introduce a framework for simultaneous cross-linguistic…
How can speech-to-text translation (ST) perform as well as machine translation (MT)? The key point is to bridge the modality gap between speech and text so that useful MT techniques can be applied to ST. Recently, the approach of…
Inflectional variation is a common feature of World Englishes such as Colloquial Singapore English and African American Vernacular English. Although comprehension by human readers is usually unimpaired by non-standard inflections, current…
Discrete audio tokens derived from self-supervised learning models have gained widespread usage in speech generation. However, current practice of directly utilizing audio tokens poses challenges for sequence modeling due to the length of…
In conventional speech recognition, phoneme-based models outperform grapheme-based models for non-phonetic languages such as English. The performance gap between the two typically reduces as the amount of training data is increased. In this…
Using a vocabulary that is shared across languages is common practice in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT). In addition to its simple design, shared tokens play an important role in positive knowledge transfer, assuming that…
State-of-the-art language models are autoregressive and operate on subword units known as tokens. Specifically, one must encode the conditioning string into a list of tokens before passing to the language models for next-token prediction.…