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Related papers: Fast WordPiece Tokenization

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Language models typically tokenize text into subwords, using a deterministic, hand-engineered heuristic of combining characters into longer surface-level strings such as 'ing' or whole words. Recent literature has repeatedly shown the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Avijit Thawani , Saurabh Ghanekar , Xiaoyuan Zhu , Jay Pujara

The standard BERT adopts subword-based tokenization, which may break a word into two or more wordpieces (e.g., converting "lossless" to "loss" and "less"). This will bring inconvenience in following situations: (1) what is the best way to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-02-25 Zhangyin Feng , Duyu Tang , Cong Zhou , Junwei Liao , Shuangzhi Wu , Xiaocheng Feng , Bing Qin , Yunbo Cao , Shuming Shi

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Sudhansu Bala Das , Samujjal Choudhury , Tapas Kumar Mishra , Bidyut Kr. Patra

We introduce a new tokenizer for language models that minimizes the average tokens per character, thereby reducing the number of tokens needed to represent text during training and to generate text during inference. Our method, which we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Dong Dong , Weijie Su

Tokenization imposes a fixed granularity on the input text, freezing how a language model operates on data and how far in the future it predicts. Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) and similar schemes split text once, build a static vocabulary, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Mathurin Videau , Badr Youbi Idrissi , Alessandro Leite , Marc Schoenauer , Olivier Teytaud , David Lopez-Paz

This paper describes SentencePiece, a language-independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer designed for Neural-based text processing, including Neural Machine Translation. It provides open-source C++ and Python implementations for subword…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-08-21 Taku Kudo , John Richardson

Tokenization is the first -- and often least scrutinized -- step of most NLP pipelines. Standard algorithms for learning tokenizers rely on frequency-based objectives, which favor languages dominant in the training data and consequently…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Negar Foroutan , Clara Meister , Debjit Paul , Joel Niklaus , Sina Ahmadi , Antoine Bosselut , Rico Sennrich

Subword tokenization schemes are the dominant technique used in current NLP models. However, such schemes can be rigid and tokenizers built on one corpus do not adapt well to other parallel corpora. It has also been observed that in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Makesh Narsimhan Sreedhar , Xiangpeng Wan , Yu Cheng , Junjie Hu

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

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

Subword tokenization is a commonly used input pre-processing step in most recent NLP models. However, it limits the models' ability to leverage end-to-end task learning. Its frequency-based vocabulary creation compromises tokenization in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-25 Md Mofijul Islam , Gustavo Aguilar , Pragaash Ponnusamy , Clint Solomon Mathialagan , Chengyuan Ma , Chenlei Guo

Tokenization plays a critical role in language modeling, yet existing approaches such as Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) or WordPiece operate purely on frequency statistics, ignoring the underlying semantic structure of text. This leads to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Dong Liu , Yanxuan Yu

Tokenizing raw texts into word units is an essential pre-processing step for critical tasks in the NLP pipeline such as tagging, parsing, named entity recognition, and more. For most languages, this tokenization step straightforward.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Idan Brusilovsky , Reut Tsarfaty

Pre-tokenization, the initial step in many modern tokenization pipelines, segments text into smaller units called pretokens, typically splitting on whitespace and punctuation. While this process encourages having full, individual words as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Craig W. Schmidt , Varshini Reddy , Chris Tanner , Yuval Pinter

Tokenisation is an integral part of the current NLP pipeline. Current tokenisation algorithms such as BPE and Unigram are greedy algorithms -- they make locally optimal decisions without considering the resulting vocabulary as a whole. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Jan Tempus , Philip Whittington , Craig W. Schmidt , Dennis Komm , Tiago Pimentel

Spiking neural networks offer a promising path toward energy-efficient, brain-like associative memory. This paper introduces Word2Spike, a novel rate coding mechanism that combines continuous word embeddings and neuromorphic architectures.…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Archit Kalra , Midhun Sadanand

Efficiently identifying keyphrases that represent a given document is a challenging task. In the last years, plethora of keyword detection approaches were proposed. These approaches can be based on statistical (frequency-based) properties…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-12-25 Blaž Škrlj , Boshko Koloski , Senja Pollak

Subword tokenization methods, such as Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE), significantly impact the performance and efficiency of large language models (LLMs). The standard approach involves training a general-purpose tokenizer that uniformly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Vijini Liyanage , François Yvon

Fuzzy string matching and language classification are important tools in Natural Language Processing pipelines, this paper provides advances in both areas. We propose a fast novel approach to string tokenisation for fuzzy language matching…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-09-25 Malgorzata Pikies , Andronicus Riyono , Junade Ali

Subword tokenization has become the prevailing standard in the field of natural language processing (NLP) over recent years, primarily due to the widespread utilization of pre-trained language models. This shift began with Byte-Pair…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Yanis Labrak , Adrien Bazoge , Beatrice Daille , Mickael Rouvier , Richard Dufour