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Existing Machine Translation (MT) research often suggests a single, fixed set of hyperparameters for word segmentation models, symmetric Byte Pair Encoding (BPE), which applies the same number of merge operations (NMO) to train tokenizers…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Saumitra Yadav , Manish Shrivastava

Byte-level fallbacks for subword tokenization have become a common practice in large language models. In particular, it has been demonstrated to be incredibly effective as a pragmatic solution for preventing OOV, especially in the context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Sangwhan Moon , Tatsuya Hiraoka , Naoaki Okazaki

What are the units of text that we want to model? From bytes to multi-word expressions, text can be analyzed and generated at many granularities. Until recently, most natural language processing (NLP) models operated over words, treating…

The Byte Pair Encoding algorithm can be safely batched to merge hundreds of pairs of tokens at a time when building up a tokenizer's vocabulary. This technique combined with reducing the memory footprint of text used in vocabulary training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Alexander P. Morgan

Neural machine translation (NMT) is one of the best methods for understanding the differences in semantic rules between two languages. Especially for Indo-European languages, subword-level models have achieved impressive results. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-11-11 Wei Zhang , Feifei Lin , Xiaodong Wang , Zhenshuang Liang , Zhen Huang

Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) is a widely used method for subword tokenization, with origins in grammar-based text compression. It is employed in a variety of language processing tasks such as machine translation or large language model (LLM)…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-11-14 László Kozma , Johannes Voderholzer

Traditional greedy tokenization methods have been a critical step in Natural Language Processing (NLP), influencing how text is converted into tokens and directly impacting model performance. While subword tokenizers like Byte-Pair Encoding…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Bharath Raj , Garvit Suri , Vikrant Dewangan , Raghav Sonavane

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…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2018-11-27 Bo Li , Yu Zhang , Tara Sainath , Yonghui Wu , William Chan

Multilingual modelling can improve machine translation for low-resource languages, partly through shared subword representations. This paper studies the role of subword segmentation in cross-lingual transfer. We systematically compare the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-01 Francois Meyer , Jan Buys

Neural machine translation (NMT), a new approach to machine translation, has been proved to outperform conventional statistical machine translation (SMT) across a variety of language pairs. Translation is an open-vocabulary problem, but…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-11-15 Yining Wang , Long Zhou , Jiajun Zhang , Chengqing Zong

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.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Langlin Huang , Mengyu Bu , Yang Feng

Past vocabulary learning techniques identify relevant vocabulary before training, relying on statistical and entropy-based assumptions that largely neglect the role of model training. Empirically, we observe that trained translation models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Pin-Jie Lin , Ernie Chang , Yangyang Shi , Vikas Chandra

Recent dynamic tokenisation methods operate directly on bytes and pool their latent representations into patches. This bears similarities to computational models of word segmentation that determine lexical boundaries using spikes in an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Zébulon Goriely , Suchir Salhan , Pietro Lesci , Julius Cheng , Paula Buttery

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Craig W. Schmidt , Varshini Reddy , Haoran Zhang , Alec Alameddine , Omri Uzan , Yuval Pinter , Chris Tanner

NMT systems have problems with large vocabulary sizes. Byte-pair encoding (BPE) is a popular approach to solving this problem, but while BPE allows the system to generate any target-side word, it does not enable effective generalization…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-09-06 Aleš Tamchyna , Marion Weller-Di Marco , Alexander Fraser

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Xuanli He , Gholamreza Haffari , Mohammad Norouzi

Standard Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenization compresses text by pairing a learned token vocabulary with a detailed merge list. Recent work has shown that this merge list exposes a potential attack surface for extracting information about…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Tomohiro Sawada , Kartik Goyal

Phones and their context-dependent variants have been the standard modeling units for conventional speech recognition systems, while characters and subwords have demonstrated their effectiveness for end-to-end recognition systems. We…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-06-23 Weiran Wang , Guangsen Wang , Aadyot Bhatnagar , Yingbo Zhou , Caiming Xiong , Richard Socher

Byte pair encoding (BPE) emerges as an effective tokenization method for tackling the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) challenge in various natural language and speech processing tasks. Recent research highlights the dependency of BPE subword…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Ahnaf Mozib Samin

We introduce three simple randomized variants of byte pair encoding (BPE) and explore whether randomizing the selection of merge operations substantially affects a downstream machine translation task. We focus on translation into…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-05 Jonne Sälevä , Constantine Lignos