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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

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

In this work, we leverage the intrinsic segmentation of language sequences and design a new positional encoding method called Bilevel Positional Encoding (BiPE). For each position, our BiPE blends an intra-segment encoding and an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Zhenyu He , Guhao Feng , Shengjie Luo , Kai Yang , Liwei Wang , Jingjing Xu , Zhi Zhang , Hongxia Yang , Di He

We introduce three simple randomized variants of byte pair encoding (BPE) and explore whether randomizing the selection of merge operations substantially affects a downstream machine translation task. We focus on translation into…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-05 Jonne Sälevä , Constantine Lignos

We propose a generalization of neural network sequence models. Instead of predicting one symbol at a time, our multi-scale model makes predictions over multiple, potentially overlapping multi-symbol tokens. A variation of the byte-pair…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-06 Bart van Merriënboer , Amartya Sanyal , Hugo Larochelle , Yoshua Bengio

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 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 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

Auto-regressive neural sequence models have been shown to be effective across text generation tasks. However, their left-to-right decoding order prevents generation from being parallelized. Insertion Transformer (Stern et al., 2019) is an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Zhisong Zhang , Yizhe Zhang , Bill Dolan

Tokenization is a critical preprocessing step in large language model pipelines, yet widely-used implementations remain CPU-bound and suboptimal for batch inference workflows on GPU. We present BlockBPE, a parallel GPU implementation of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Amos You

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

We explore the use of segments learnt using Byte Pair Encoding (referred to as BPE units) as basic units for statistical machine translation between related languages and compare it with orthographic syllables, which are currently the best…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-07-24 Anoop Kunchukuttan , Pushpak Bhattacharyya

Tokenization is the process of encoding strings into tokens of a fixed vocabulary size, and is widely utilized in Natural Language Processing applications. The leading tokenization algorithm today is Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE), which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Jia Peng Lim , Shawn Tan , Davin Choo , Hady W. Lauw

This paper introduces Dynamic Programming Encoding (DPE), a new segmentation algorithm for tokenizing sentences into subword units. We view the subword segmentation of output sentences as a latent variable that should be marginalized out…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Xuanli He , Gholamreza Haffari , Mohammad Norouzi

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Sawsan Alqahtani , Mir Tafseer Nayeem , Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar , Tasnim Mohiuddin , M Saiful Bari

The emergence of telomere-to-telomere (T2T) genome assemblies has opened new avenues for comparative genomics, yet effective tokenization strategies for genomic sequences remain underexplored. In this pilot study, we apply Byte Pair…

Genomics · Quantitative Biology 2025-05-15 Marina Popova , Iaroslav Chelombitko , Aleksey Komissarov

Typically, tokenization is the very first step in most text processing works. As a token serves as an atomic unit that embeds the contextual information of text, how to define a token plays a decisive role in the performance of a model.Even…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Kyubyong Park , Joohong Lee , Seongbo Jang , Dawoon Jung

In language processing, transformers benefit greatly from text being condensed. This is achieved through a larger vocabulary that captures word fragments instead of plain characters. This is often done with Byte Pair Encoding. In the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-11-18 Tim Elsner , Paula Usinger , Julius Nehring-Wirxel , Gregor Kobsik , Victor Czech , Yanjiang He , Isaak Lim , Leif Kobbelt

Past vocabulary learning techniques identify relevant vocabulary before training, relying on statistical and entropy-based assumptions that largely neglect the role of model training. Empirically, we observe that trained translation models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Pin-Jie Lin , Ernie Chang , Yangyang Shi , Vikas Chandra

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