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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 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

Subword tokenization is an essential part of modern large language models (LLMs), yet its specific contributions to training efficiency and model performance remain poorly understood. In this work, we decouple the effects of subword…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Théo Gigant , Bowen Peng , Jeffrey Quesnelle

While tokenization is a key step in language modeling, with effects on model training and performance, it remains unclear how to effectively evaluate tokenizer quality. One proposed dimension of tokenizer quality is the extent to which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Catherine Arnett , Marisa Hudspeth , Brendan O'Connor

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

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

The quality of subword tokenization is critical for Large Language Models, yet evaluating tokenizers for morphologically rich Uralic languages is hampered by the lack of clean morpheme lexicons. We introduce SampoNLP, a corpus-free toolkit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Iaroslav Chelombitko , Ekaterina Chelombitko , Aleksey Komissarov

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

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is an open vocabulary problem. As a result, dealing with the words not occurring during training (a.k.a. out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words) have long been a fundamental challenge for NMT systems. The predominant…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-08-18 Ali Araabi , Christof Monz , Vlad Niculae

Byte-pair encoding (BPE) is a ubiquitous algorithm in the subword tokenization process of language models as it provides multiple benefits. However, this process is solely based on pre-training data statistics, making it hard for the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Gustavo Aguilar , Bryan McCann , Tong Niu , Nazneen Rajani , Nitish Keskar , Thamar Solorio

We study the problem of word-level confidence estimation in subword-based end-to-end (E2E) models for automatic speech recognition (ASR). Although prior works have proposed training auxiliary confidence models for ASR systems, they do not…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-03-12 David Qiu , Qiujia Li , Yanzhang He , Yu Zhang , Bo Li , Liangliang Cao , Rohit Prabhavalkar , Deepti Bhatia , Wei Li , Ke Hu , Tara N. Sainath , Ian McGraw

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

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

We present three innovations in tokenization and subword segmentation. First, we propose to use unsupervised morphological analysis with Morfessor as pre-tokenization. Second, we present an algebraic method for obtaining subword embeddings…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Jindřich Libovický , Jindřich Helcl

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 a pivotal design choice for neural language modeling in morphologically rich languages (MRLs) such as Turkish, where productive agglutination challenges both vocabulary efficiency and morphological fidelity. Prior studies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Duygu Altinok

We introduce a morpheme-aware subword tokenization method that utilizes sub-character decomposition to address the challenges of applying Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) to Korean, a language characterized by its rich morphology and unique writing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Taehee Jeon , Bongseok Yang , Changhwan Kim , Yoonseob Lim

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…

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 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