Related papers: Understanding and Mitigating Tokenization Bias in …

Language prediction is constrained by informational entropy intrinsic to language, such that there exists a limit to how accurate any language model can become and equivalently a lower bound to language compression. The most efficient…

Modern language models mostly take sub-words as input, a design that balances the trade-off between vocabulary size, number of parameters, and performance. However, sub-word tokenization still has disadvantages like not being robust to…

Byte-based machine translation systems have shown significant potential in massively multilingual settings. Unicode encoding, which maps each character to specific byte(s), eliminates the emergence of unknown words, even in new languages.…

While there has been a large body of research attempting to circumvent tokenization for language modeling (Clark et al., 2022; Xue et al., 2022), the current consensus is that it is a necessary initial step for designing state-of-the-art…

Tokenization - the practice of converting strings of characters from an alphabet into sequences of tokens over a vocabulary - is a critical step in the NLP pipeline. The use of token representations is widely credited with increased model…

Adapting language models to new data distributions by simple finetuning is challenging. This is due to the rigidity of their subword tokenizers, which typically remain unchanged during adaptation. This inflexibility often leads to…

Discrete audio tokens derived from self-supervised learning models have gained widespread usage in speech generation. However, current practice of directly utilizing audio tokens poses challenges for sequence modeling due to the length of…

Pipelined NLP systems have largely been superseded by end-to-end neural modeling, yet nearly all commonly-used models still require an explicit tokenization step. While recent tokenization approaches based on data-derived subword lexicons…

Modern language models still rely on fixed, pre-defined subword tokenizations. Once a tokenizer is trained, the LM can only operate at this fixed level of granularity, which often leads to brittle and counterintuitive behaviors even in…

Tokenization is an important preprocessing step in the training and inference of large language models (LLMs). While there has been extensive research on the expressive power of the neural achitectures used in LLMs, the impact of…

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…

Generative language models are usually pretrained on large text corpus via predicting the next token (i.e., sub-word/word/phrase) given the previous ones. Recent works have demonstrated the impressive performance of large generative…

This study investigates the impact of morphological typology on tokenization and language modeling performance. We focus on languages with synthetic and analytical morphological structures and examine their productivity when tokenized using…

Subword tokenization is a commonly used input pre-processing step in most recent NLP models. However, it limits the models' ability to leverage end-to-end task learning. Its frequency-based vocabulary creation compromises tokenization in…

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…

Modern language models are internally -- and mathematically -- distributions over $\it{token}$ strings rather than $\it{character}$ strings, posing numerous challenges for programmers building user applications on top of them. For example,…

Pretrained multilingual encoder models can directly perform zero-shot multilingual tasks or linguistic probing by reformulating the input examples into cloze-style prompts. This is accomplished by predicting the probabilities of the label…

Efficiency and safety of Large Language Models (LLMs), among other factors, rely on the quality of tokenization. A good tokenizer not only improves inference speed and language understanding but also provides extra defense against jailbreak…

The Byte Pair Encoding algorithm can be safely batched to merge hundreds of pairs of tokens at a time when building up a tokenizer's vocabulary. This technique combined with reducing the memory footprint of text used in vocabulary training…

Continual incorporation of new knowledge is essential for the long-term evolution of large language models (LLMs). Existing approaches typically rely on parameter-update algorithms to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, yet they suffer from…