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Related papers: Formalizing BPE Tokenization

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Subword tokenization is a key design choice for modern language models, including large language models (LLMs), with byte- and character-level BPE serving as a widely used baseline. Standard BPE selects merges by raw pair frequency, which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Azam Nouri

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

In this work, we show a fundamental limitation in vocabulary adaptation approaches that use Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenization scheme for fine-tuning pretrained language models (PLMs) to expert domains. Current approaches trivially…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Gunjan Balde , Soumyadeep Roy , Mainack Mondal , Niloy Ganguly

Byte pair encoding (BPE) emerges as an effective tokenization method for tackling the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) challenge in various natural language and speech processing tasks. Recent research highlights the dependency of BPE subword…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Ahnaf Mozib Samin

Tokenization is used almost universally by modern language models, enabling efficient text representation using multi-byte or multi-character tokens. However, prior work has shown that tokenization can introduce distortion into the model's…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Jonathan Hayase , Alisa Liu , Noah A. Smith , Sewoong Oh

Tokenization is a critical component of Natural Language Processing (NLP), especially for low resource languages, where subword segmentation influences vocabulary structure and downstream task accuracy. Although Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-25 Priyaranjan Pattnayak , Hitesh Laxmichand Patel , Amit Agarwal

We propose a generalization of neural network sequence models. Instead of predicting one symbol at a time, our multi-scale model makes predictions over multiple, potentially overlapping multi-symbol tokens. A variation of the byte-pair…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-06 Bart van Merriënboer , Amartya Sanyal , Hugo Larochelle , Yoshua Bengio

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

Unlike hybrid speech recognition systems where the use of tokens was restricted to phones, biphones or triphones the choice of tokens in the end-to-end ASR systems is derived from the text corpus of the training data. The use of…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-06-06 Sunil Kumar Kopparapu , Ashish Panda

State-of-the-art language models are autoregressive and operate on subword units known as tokens. Specifically, one must encode the conditioning string into a list of tokens before passing to the language models for next-token prediction.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Buu Phan , Marton Havasi , Matthew Muckley , Karen Ullrich

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

Recent works have shown that tokenisation is NP-complete. However, these works assume tokenisation is applied to inputs with unboundedly large alphabets -- an unrealistic assumption, given that in practice tokenisers operate over fixed-size…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Violeta Kastreva , Philip Whittington , Dennis Komm , Tiago Pimentel

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

Efficiency and safety of Large Language Models (LLMs), among other factors, rely on the quality of tokenization. A good tokenizer not only improves inference speed and language understanding but also provides extra defense against jailbreak…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Pavel Chizhov , Egor Bogomolov , Ivan P. Yamshchikov

Subword tokenization has been widely successful in text-based natural language processing (NLP) tasks with Transformer-based models. As Transformer models become increasingly popular in symbolic music-related studies, it is imperative to…

Sound · Computer Science 2023-04-26 Adarsh Kumar , Pedro Sarmento

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

Tokenization is a necessary component within the current architecture of many language mod-els, including the transformer-based large language models (LLMs) of Generative AI, yet its impact on the model's cognition is often overlooked. We…

NMT systems have problems with large vocabulary sizes. Byte-pair encoding (BPE) is a popular approach to solving this problem, but while BPE allows the system to generate any target-side word, it does not enable effective generalization…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-09-06 Aleš Tamchyna , Marion Weller-Di Marco , Alexander Fraser

Tokenization is the foundational step in all large language model (LLM) pipelines, yet the dominant approach Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) and its variants is inherently script agnostic and optimized for English like morphology. For…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Prabhu Raja

This paper provides a detailed discussion of the multilingual tokenizer used for GPT-SW3. It was trained on the Nordic Pile using the SentencePiece library and the BPE algorithm. We outline the tokenizer's most important features and share…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-01 Felix Stollenwerk