Related papers: Learn Your Tokens: Word-Pooled Tokenization for La…

Current language models (LMs) use a fixed, static subword tokenizer. This default choice typically results in degraded efficiency and language capabilities, especially in languages other than English. To address this issue, we challenge the…

Recent advances in generative AI have been largely driven by large language models (LLMs), deep neural networks that operate over discrete units called tokens. To represent text, the vast majority of LLMs use words or word fragments as the…

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…

Despite recent successes in language models, their ability to represent numbers is insufficient. Humans conceptualize numbers based on their magnitudes, effectively projecting them on a number line; whereas subword tokenization fails to…

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…

Subword tokenizers trained on multilingual corpora naturally produce overlapping tokens across languages. Does token overlap facilitate cross-lingual transfer or instead introduce interference between languages? Prior work offers mixed…

Tokenizer adaptation plays an important role in adapting pre-trained language models to new domains or languages. In this work, we address two complementary aspects of this process: vocabulary extension and pruning. The common approach to…

Modern language models are trained almost exclusively on token sequences produced by a fixed tokenizer, an external lossless compressor often over UTF-8 byte sequences, thereby coupling the model to that compressor. This work introduces…

Choosing an appropriate tokenization scheme is often a bottleneck in low-resource cross-lingual transfer. To understand the downstream implications of text representation choices, we perform a comparative analysis on language models having…

Many NLP applications, such as biomedical data and technical support, have 10-100 million tokens of in-domain data and limited computational resources for learning from it. How should we train a language model in this scenario? Most…

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…

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have remarkably enhanced performances on a variety of tasks in multiple languages. However, tokenizers in LLMs trained primarily on English-centric corpora often overly fragment a text…

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…

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…

Variation in language is ubiquitous and often systematically linked to regional, social, and contextual factors. Tokenizers split texts into smaller units and might behave differently for less common linguistic forms. This might affect…

One of the challenges with finetuning pretrained language models (PLMs) is that their tokenizer is optimized for the language(s) it was pretrained on, but brittle when it comes to previously unseen variations in the data. This can for…

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…

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…

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…

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…