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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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-07 Jimin Hong , Gibbeum Lee , Jaewoong Cho

Large language models (LLMs) for code rely on subword tokenizers, such as byte-pair encoding (BPE), learned from mixed natural language text and programming language code but driven by statistics rather than grammar. As a result,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Yinxi Li , Yuntian Deng , Pengyu Nie

We explore threshold vocabulary trimming in Byte-Pair Encoding subword tokenization, a postprocessing step that replaces rare subwords with their component subwords. The technique is available in popular tokenization libraries but has not…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Marco Cognetta , Tatsuya Hiraoka , Naoaki Okazaki , Rico Sennrich , Yuval Pinter

Tokenization is the first step in every language model (LM), yet it never takes the sounds of words into account. We investigate how tokenization influences text-only LMs' ability to represent phonological knowledge. Through a series of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Disen Liao , Freda Shi

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

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

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

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has led to significant improvements in natural language processing but also poses challenges due to their high computational and energy demands. This paper introduces a series of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-27 Dylan Hillier , Leon Guertler , Cheston Tan , Palaash Agrawal , Chen Ruirui , Bobby Cheng

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Taido Purason , Pavel Chizhov , Ivan P. Yamshchikov , Mark Fishel

This paper presents a comprehensive examination of the impact of tokenization strategies and vocabulary sizes on the performance of Arabic language models in downstream natural language processing tasks. Our investigation focused on the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Mohamed Taher Alrefaie , Nour Eldin Morsy , Nada Samir

Purely character-based language models (LMs) have been lagging in quality on large scale datasets, and current state-of-the-art LMs rely on word tokenization. It has been assumed that injecting the prior knowledge of a tokenizer into the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-08-28 Dokook Choe , Rami Al-Rfou , Mandy Guo , Heeyoung Lee , Noah Constant

Transformers, the backbone of modern large language models (LLMs), face inherent architectural limitations that impede their reasoning capabilities. Unlike recurrent networks, Transformers lack recurrent connections, confining them to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Xiang Zhang , Juntai Cao , Chenyu You

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

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 plays a pivotal role in multilingual NLP. However, existing tokenizers are often skewed towards high-resource languages, limiting their effectiveness for linguistically diverse and morphologically rich languages such as those…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-25 N J Karthika , Maharaj Brahma , Rohit Saluja , Ganesh Ramakrishnan , Maunendra Sankar Desarkar

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Darius Feher , Ivan Vulić , Benjamin Minixhofer

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 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

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…