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Related papers: Formalizing BPE Tokenization

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Tokenization is an important first step in Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipelines because it decides how models learn and represent linguistic information. However, current subword tokenizers like SentencePiece or HuggingFace BPE are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Firoj Ahmmed Patwary , Abdullah Al Noman

Tokenization is the first step in modern neural language model pipelines where an input text is converted to a sequence of subword tokens. We introduce from first principles a finite-state transduction framework which can efficiently encode…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Marco Cognetta , Naoaki Okazaki

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

Tokenization is a fundamental preprocessing step for almost all NLP tasks. In this paper, we propose efficient algorithms for the WordPiece tokenization used in BERT, from single-word tokenization to general text (e.g., sentence)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Xinying Song , Alex Salcianu , Yang Song , Dave Dopson , Denny Zhou

Typically, tokenization is the very first step in most text processing works. As a token serves as an atomic unit that embeds the contextual information of text, how to define a token plays a decisive role in the performance of a model.Even…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Kyubyong Park , Joohong Lee , Seongbo Jang , Dawoon Jung

Tokenization is a crucial step in processing protein sequences for machine learning models, as proteins are complex sequences of amino acids that require meaningful segmentation to capture their functional and structural properties.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-27 Burak Suyunu , Enes Taylan , Arzucan Özgür

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

Multimodal Large Language Models have made significant strides in integrating visual and textual information, yet they often struggle with effectively aligning these modalities. We introduce a novel image tokenizer that bridges this gap by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Wanpeng Zhang , Zilong Xie , Yicheng Feng , Yijiang Li , Xingrun Xing , Sipeng Zheng , Zongqing Lu

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

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

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…

Tokenisation is the first step in almost all NLP tasks, and state-of-the-art transformer-based language models all use subword tokenisation algorithms to process input text. Existing algorithms have problems, often producing tokenisations…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Edward Gow-Smith , Harish Tayyar Madabushi , Carolina Scarton , Aline Villavicencio

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

Many natural language processing systems operate over tokenizations of text to address the open-vocabulary problem. In this paper, we give and analyze an algorithm for the efficient construction of deterministic finite automata (DFA)…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Martin Berglund , Willeke Martens , Brink van der Merwe

Subword tokenization methods like Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) are widely used in large language models due to their balance of vocabulary compactness and representational power. However, they suffer from inefficiencies in representing rare…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Rares Dolga , Lucas Maystre , Tudor Berariu , David Barber

Tokenization - the practice of converting strings of characters from an alphabet into sequences of tokens over a vocabulary - is a critical step in the NLP pipeline. The use of token representations is widely credited with increased model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-04 Juan Luis Gastaldi , John Terilla , Luca Malagutti , Brian DuSell , Tim Vieira , Ryan Cotterell

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

Tokenization is an important text preprocessing step to prepare input tokens for deep language models. WordPiece and BPE are de facto methods employed by important models, such as BERT and GPT. However, the impact of tokenization can be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-28 Cagri Toraman , Eyup Halit Yilmaz , Furkan Şahinuç , Oguzhan Ozcelik

The prevalent use of Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) in Large Language Models (LLMs) facilitates robust handling of subword units and avoids issues of out-of-vocabulary words. Despite its success, a critical challenge persists: long tokens, rich…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Haoran Lian , Yizhe Xiong , Zijia Lin , Jianwei Niu , Shasha Mo , Hui Chen , Peng Liu , Guiguang Ding

Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenizers, widely used in Large Language Models, face challenges in multilingual settings, including penalization of non-Western scripts and the creation of tokens with partial UTF-8 sequences. Pretokenization,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Sander Land , Catherine Arnett
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