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Related papers: Formalizing BPE Tokenization

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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

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

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

The success of pretrained transformer language models (LMs) in natural language processing has led to a wide range of pretraining setups. In particular, these models employ a variety of subword tokenization methods, most notably byte-pair…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Kaj Bostrom , Greg Durrett

Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) is a widely used tokenization algorithm, whose tokens cannot extend across pre-tokenization boundaries, functionally limiting it to representing at most full words. The BoundlessBPE and SuperBPE algorithms extend…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Craig W. Schmidt , Chris Tanner , Yuval Pinter

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

When used with deep learning, the symbolic music modality is often coupled with language model architectures. To do so, the music needs to be tokenized, i.e. converted into a sequence of discrete tokens. This can be achieved by different…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-14 Nathan Fradet , Nicolas Gutowski , Fabien Chhel , Jean-Pierre Briot

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

The Unigram tokenization algorithm offers a probabilistic alternative to the greedy heuristics of Byte-Pair Encoding. Despite its theoretical elegance, its implementation in practice is complex, limiting its adoption to the SentencePiece…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Sander Land , Yuval Pinter

Tokenization is a critical part of modern NLP pipelines. However, contemporary tokenizers for Large Language Models are based on statistical analysis of text corpora, without much consideration to the linguistic features. I propose a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Haris Jabbar

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

The success of large pretrained Transformers is closely tied to tokenizers, which convert raw input into discrete symbols. Extending these models to graph-structured data remains a significant challenge. In this work, we introduce a graph…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Zeyuan Guo , Enmao Diao , Cheng Yang , Chuan Shi

Tokenization is fundamental to Natural Language Processing (NLP), directly impacting model efficiency and linguistic fidelity. While Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) is widely used in Large Language Models (LLMs), it often disregards morpheme…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Ehsaneddin Asgari , Yassine El Kheir , Mohammad Ali Sadraei Javaheri

Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) has become a widely adopted subword tokenization method in modern language models due to its simplicity and strong empirical performance across downstream tasks. However, applying BPE to unsegmented languages such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Yifan Hu , Frank Liang , Dachuan Zhao , Jonathan Geuter , Varshini Reddy , Craig W. Schmidt , Chris Tanner

Tokenization is a crucial step in NLP, especially with the rise of large language models (LLMs), impacting downstream performance, computational cost, and efficiency. Existing LLMs rely on the classical Byte-pair Encoding (BPE) algorithm…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Maharaj Brahma , N J Karthika , Atul Singh , Devaraj Adiga , Smruti Bhate , Ganesh Ramakrishnan , Rohit Saluja , Maunendra Sankar Desarkar

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

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

As a cornerstone in language modeling, tokenization involves segmenting text inputs into pre-defined atomic units. Conventional statistical tokenizers often disrupt constituent boundaries within words, thereby corrupting semantic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Qingyang Zhu , Xiang Hu , Pengyu Ji , Wei Wu , Kewei Tu

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

In language processing, transformers benefit greatly from text being condensed. This is achieved through a larger vocabulary that captures word fragments instead of plain characters. This is often done with Byte Pair Encoding. In the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-11-18 Tim Elsner , Paula Usinger , Julius Nehring-Wirxel , Gregor Kobsik , Victor Czech , Yanjiang He , Isaak Lim , Leif Kobbelt