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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

Tokenization is associated with many poorly understood shortcomings in language models (LMs), yet remains an important component for long sequence scaling purposes. This work studies how tokenization impacts model performance by analyzing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Buu Phan , Brandon Amos , Itai Gat , Marton Havasi , Matthew Muckley , Karen Ullrich

A multilingual tokenizer is a fundamental component of multilingual neural machine translation. It is trained from a multilingual corpus. Since a skewed data distribution is considered to be harmful, a sampling strategy is usually used to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Shiyue Zhang , Vishrav Chaudhary , Naman Goyal , James Cross , Guillaume Wenzek , Mohit Bansal , Francisco Guzman

Subword tokenization requires balancing computational efficiency and vocabulary coverage, which often leads to suboptimal performance on languages and scripts not prioritized during training. We propose to augment pretrained language models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Jonas F. Lotz , Hendra Setiawan , Stephan Peitz , Yova Kementchedjhieva

Tokenization is an understudied and often neglected component of modern LLMs. Most published works use a single tokenizer for all experiments, often borrowed from another model, without performing ablations or analysis to optimize…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Gautier Dagan , Gabriel Synnaeve , Baptiste Rozière

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

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

Tokenizers act as a bridge between human language and the latent space of language models, influencing how language is represented in these models. Due to the immense popularity of English-Centric Large Language Models (LLMs), efforts are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Menan Velayuthan , Kengatharaiyer Sarveswaran

Pretraining massively multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) for many languages at once is challenging due to limited model capacity, scarce high-quality data, and compute constraints. Moreover, the lack of language coverage of the…

Tokenization is fundamental to pretrained language models (PLMs). Existing tokenization methods for Chinese PLMs typically treat each character as an indivisible token. However, they ignore the unique feature of the Chinese writing system…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-16 Chenglei Si , Zhengyan Zhang , Yingfa Chen , Fanchao Qi , Xiaozhi Wang , Zhiyuan Liu , Yasheng Wang , Qun Liu , Maosong Sun

Multilingual language models have recently gained attention as a promising solution for representing multiple languages in a single model. In this paper, we propose new criteria to evaluate the quality of lexical representation and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Tomasz Limisiewicz , Jiří Balhar , David Mareček

The relationship between tokenizer algorithm (e.g., Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE), Unigram), morphological alignment, tokenization quality (e.g., compression efficiency), and downstream performance remains largely unclear, particularly for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Saketh Reddy Vemula , Sandipan Dandapat , Dipti Misra Sharma , Parameswari Krishnamurthy

The number of tokens it takes to encode parallel text in different languages is known to vary. These disparities are called token premiums. Having high token premiums leads to less throughput during training and increases costs at…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Catherine Arnett , Tyler A. Chang , Stella Biderman , Benjamin K. Bergen

Language models (LMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in NLP, yet adapting them efficiently and robustly to specific tasks remains challenging. As their scale and complexity grow, fine-tuning LMs on labelled data often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Zhengyan Shi

Modern tokenizers employ deterministic algorithms to map text into a single "canonical" token sequence, yet the same string can be encoded as many non-canonical tokenizations using the tokenizer vocabulary. In this work, we investigate the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Brian Siyuan Zheng , Alisa Liu , Orevaoghene Ahia , Jonathan Hayase , Yejin Choi , Noah A. Smith

Traditionally, NLP performance improvement has been focused on improving models and increasing the number of model parameters. NLP vocabulary construction has remained focused on maximizing the number of words represented through subword…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-04-26 Sandeep Mehta , Darpan Shah , Ravindra Kulkarni , Cornelia Caragea

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional code generation capabilities, yet their token-level mechanisms remain underexplored, particularly in compressed models. Through systematic analysis of programming language token…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Viacheslav Siniaev , Iaroslav Chelombitko , Aleksey Komissarov

The vocabulary used by language models (LM) - defined by the tokenizer - plays a key role in text generation quality. However, its impact remains under-explored in radiology. In this work, we address this gap by systematically comparing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Hermione Warr , Wentian Xu , Harry Anthony , Yasin Ibrahim , Daniel McGowan , Konstantinos Kamnitsas

The best performing transformer-based language models use subword tokenization techniques, such as Byte-Pair-Encoding (BPE). However, these approaches often overlook linguistic principles, such as morphological segmentation, which we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Mikkel Wildner Kildeberg , Emil Allerslev Schledermann , Nicolaj Larsen , Rob van der Goot

Tokenization is a crucial step in information retrieval, especially for lexical matching algorithms, where the quality of indexable tokens directly impacts the effectiveness of a retrieval system. Since different languages have unique…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Odunayo Ogundepo , Xinyu Zhang , Jimmy Lin