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Despite it being the cornerstone of BPE, the most common tokenization algorithm, the importance of compression in the tokenization process is still unclear. In this paper, we argue for the theoretical importance of compression, that can be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Omer Goldman , Avi Caciularu , Matan Eyal , Kris Cao , Idan Szpektor , Reut Tsarfaty

Tokenization is fundamental in assembly code analysis, impacting intrinsic characteristics like vocabulary size, semantic coverage, and extrinsic performance in downstream tasks. Despite its significance, tokenization in the context of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Ahmed Mostafa , Raisul Arefin Nahid , Samuel Mulder

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

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

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

Tokenization and sub-tokenization based models like word2vec, BERT and the GPTs are the state-of-the-art in natural language processing. Typically, these approaches have limitations with respect to their input representation. They fail to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Felix Schneider , Maria Gogolev , Sven Sickert , Joachim Denzler

The prevalent use of Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) in Large Language Models (LLMs) facilitates robust handling of subword units and avoids issues of out-of-vocabulary words. Despite its success, a critical challenge persists: long tokens, rich…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Haoran Lian , Yizhe Xiong , Zijia Lin , Jianwei Niu , Shasha Mo , Hui Chen , Peng Liu , Guiguang Ding

Word-level quality estimation (WQE) aims to automatically identify fine-grained error spans in machine-translated outputs and has found many uses, including assisting translators during post-editing. Modern WQE techniques are often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Gabriele Sarti , Vilém Zouhar , Malvina Nissim , Arianna Bisazza

Contextual word-representations became a standard in modern natural language processing systems. These models use subword tokenization to handle large vocabularies and unknown words. Word-level usage of such systems requires a way of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Judit Ács , Ákos Kádár , András Kornai

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

We investigate tokenization strategies for Kurdish word embeddings by comparing word-level, morpheme-based, and BPE approaches on morphological similarity preservation tasks. We develop a BiLSTM-CRF morphological segmenter using…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Ali Salehi , Cassandra L. Jacobs

Standard Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenization compresses text by pairing a learned token vocabulary with a detailed merge list. Recent work has shown that this merge list exposes a potential attack surface for extracting information about…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Tomohiro Sawada , Kartik Goyal

Tokenization is an important text preprocessing step to prepare input tokens for deep language models. WordPiece and BPE are de facto methods employed by important models, such as BERT and GPT. However, the impact of tokenization can be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-28 Cagri Toraman , Eyup Halit Yilmaz , Furkan Şahinuç , Oguzhan Ozcelik

Tokenization is an important first step in Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipelines because it decides how models learn and represent linguistic information. However, current subword tokenizers like SentencePiece or HuggingFace BPE are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Firoj Ahmmed Patwary , Abdullah Al Noman

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

Multilingual language models have recently gained attention as a promising solution for representing multiple languages in a single model. In this paper, we propose new criteria to evaluate the quality of lexical representation and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Tomasz Limisiewicz , Jiří Balhar , David Mareček

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

Language models can largely benefit from efficient tokenization. However, they still mostly utilize the classical BPE algorithm, a simple and reliable method. This has been shown to cause such issues as under-trained tokens and sub-optimal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Pavel Chizhov , Catherine Arnett , Elizaveta Korotkova , Ivan P. Yamshchikov

We present BPEmb, a collection of pre-trained subword unit embeddings in 275 languages, based on Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE). In an evaluation using fine-grained entity typing as testbed, BPEmb performs competitively, and for some languages…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-10-09 Benjamin Heinzerling , Michael Strube