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The assumption across nearly all language model (LM) tokenization schemes is that tokens should be subwords, i.e., contained within word boundaries. While providing a seemingly reasonable inductive bias, is this common practice limiting the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Alisa Liu , Jonathan Hayase , Valentin Hofmann , Sewoong Oh , Noah A. Smith , Yejin Choi

Subword segmentation is widely used to address the open vocabulary problem in machine translation. The dominant approach to subword segmentation is Byte Pair Encoding (BPE), which keeps the most frequent words intact while splitting the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-05-05 Ivan Provilkov , Dmitrii Emelianenko , Elena Voita

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

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 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

With the increasing attention to molecular machine learning, various innovations have been made in designing better models or proposing more comprehensive benchmarks. However, less is studied on the data preprocessing schedule for molecular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-30 Yuchen Shen , Barnabás Póczos

When used with deep learning, the symbolic music modality is often coupled with language model architectures. To do so, the music needs to be tokenized, i.e. converted into a sequence of discrete tokens. This can be achieved by different…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-14 Nathan Fradet , Nicolas Gutowski , Fabien Chhel , Jean-Pierre Briot

Tokenization is fundamental to how language models represent and process text, yet the behavior of widely used BPE tokenizers has received far less study than model architectures and training. In this paper, we investigate intermediate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Yike Sun , Haotong Yang , Zhouchen Lin , Muhan Zhang

Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenizers, widely used in Large Language Models, face challenges in multilingual settings, including penalization of non-Western scripts and the creation of tokens with partial UTF-8 sequences. Pretokenization,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Sander Land , Catherine Arnett

Discretizing speech into tokens and generating them by a decoder-only model have been a promising direction for text-to-speech (TTS) and spoken language modeling (SLM). To shorten the sequence length of speech tokens, acoustic byte-pair…

Sound · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Bohan Li , Feiyu Shen , Yiwei Guo , Shuai Wang , Xie Chen , Kai Yu

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

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

Sequence models for binary analysis are bottlenecked by byte-level tokenization: raw bytes waste precious context window capacity for transformers and other neural network architectures, and many existing text-oriented tokenizers fail on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Michael J. Bommarito

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

Most neural machine translation systems are built upon subword units extracted by methods such as Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) or wordpiece. However, the choice of number of merge operations is generally made by following existing recipes. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-06-26 Shuoyang Ding , Adithya Renduchintala , Kevin Duh

For different language pairs, word-level neural machine translation (NMT) models with a fixed-size vocabulary suffer from the same problem of representing out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. The common practice usually replaces all these rare or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-07-26 Yingting Wu , Hai Zhao

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

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

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

Multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) requires tokenization that efficiently covers many writing systems. Byte-level BPE (BBPE) using UTF-8 is widely adopted for its language-agnostic design and full Unicode coverage, but its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Hyunsik Kim , Haeri Kim , Munhak Lee , Kyungmin Lee