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In neural machine translation (NMT), it is has become standard to translate using subword units to allow for an open vocabulary and improve accuracy on infrequent words. Byte-pair encoding (BPE) and its variants are the predominant approach…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-10-23 Elizabeth Salesky , Andrew Runge , Alex Coda , Jan Niehues , Graham Neubig

Modern neural machine translation (NMT) models have achieved competitive performance in standard benchmarks. However, they have recently been shown to suffer limitation in compositional generalization, failing to effectively learn the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Yongjing Yin , Yafu Li , Fandong Meng , Jie Zhou , Yue Zhang

Tokenization is an important preprocessing step in the training and inference of large language models (LLMs). While there has been extensive research on the expressive power of the neural achitectures used in LLMs, the impact of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Saibo Geng , Sankalp Gambhir , Chris Wendler , Robert West

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models generally perform translation using a fixed-size lexical vocabulary, which is an important bottleneck on their generalization capability and overall translation quality. The standard approach to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-10-22 Duygu Ataman , Orhan Firat , Mattia A. Di Gangi , Marcello Federico , Alexandra Birch

Language models can largely benefit from efficient tokenization. However, they still mostly utilize the classical BPE algorithm, a simple and reliable method. This has been shown to cause such issues as under-trained tokens and sub-optimal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Pavel Chizhov , Catherine Arnett , Elizaveta Korotkova , Ivan P. Yamshchikov

Existing curriculum learning approaches to Neural Machine Translation (NMT) require sampling sufficient amounts of "easy" samples from training data at the early training stage. This is not always achievable for low-resource languages where…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Chen Liang , Haoming Jiang , Xiaodong Liu , Pengcheng He , Weizhu Chen , Jianfeng Gao , Tuo Zhao

Subword tokenization introduces a computational layer in language models where many distinct token sequences decode to the same surface form and preserve meaning, yet induce different internal computations. Despite this non-uniqueness,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Adrian Cosma , Stefan Ruseti , Emilian Radoi , Mihai Dascalu

Sub-word segmentation is an essential pre-processing step for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). Existing work has shown that neural sub-word segmenters are better than Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE), however, they are inefficient as they require…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Haiyue Song , Raj Dabre , Chenhui Chu , Sadao Kurohashi , Eiichiro Sumita

Tokenization underlies every large language model, yet it remains an under-theorized and inconsistently designed component. Common subword approaches such as Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) offer scalability but often misalign with linguistic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Sawsan Alqahtani , Mir Tafseer Nayeem , Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar , Tasnim Mohiuddin , M Saiful Bari

The impact of subword tokenization on language model performance is well-documented for perplexity, with finer granularity consistently reducing this intrinsic metric. However, research on how different tokenization schemes affect a model's…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Nishant Luitel , Nirajan Bekoju , Anand Kumar Sah , Subarna Shakya

Tokenisation is a core part of language models (LMs). It involves splitting a character sequence into subwords which are assigned arbitrary indices before being served to the LM. While typically lossless, however, this process may lead to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-18 Anton Schäfer , Thomas Hofmann , Imanol Schlag , Tiago Pimentel

While model architecture and training objectives are well-studied, tokenization, particularly in multilingual contexts, remains a relatively neglected aspect of Large Language Model (LLM) development. Existing tokenizers often exhibit high…

In recent years, language models have become increasingly larger and more complex. However, the input representations for these models continue to rely on simple and greedy subword tokenization methods. In this paper, we propose a novel…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-14 David Samuel , Lilja Øvrelid

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

Many NLP models operate over sequences of subword tokens produced by hand-crafted tokenization rules and heuristic subword induction algorithms. A simple universal alternative is to represent every computerized text as a sequence of bytes…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-13 Uri Shaham , Omer Levy

All languages are equal; when it comes to tokenization, some are more equal than others. Tokens are the hidden currency that dictate the cost and latency of access to contemporary LLMs. However, many languages written in non-Latin scripts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Maitrey Mehta , Nishant Subramani , Zhichao Xu , Ashim Gupta , Vivek Srikumar

In Transformer architectures, tokens\textemdash discrete units derived from raw data\textemdash are formed by segmenting inputs into fixed-length chunks. Each token is then mapped to an embedding, enabling parallel attention computations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Zhenglun Kong , Yize Li , Fanhu Zeng , Lei Xin , Shvat Messica , Xue Lin , Pu Zhao , Manolis Kellis , Hao Tang , Marinka Zitnik

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

The impressive performance of neural networks on natural language processing tasks attributes to their ability to model complicated word and phrase compositions. To explain how the model handles semantic compositions, we study hierarchical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Xisen Jin , Zhongyu Wei , Junyi Du , Xiangyang Xue , Xiang Ren

Rapid progress in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems over the last few years has been driven primarily towards improving translation quality, and as a secondary focus, improved robustness to input perturbations (e.g. spelling and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-16 Prasanna Parthasarathi , Koustuv Sinha , Joelle Pineau , Adina Williams