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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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Pavel Chizhov , Egor Bogomolov , Ivan P. Yamshchikov

We consider the problem of making machine translation more robust to character-level variation at the source side, such as typos. Existing methods achieve greater coverage by applying subword models such as byte-pair encoding (BPE) and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-02-06 Vladimir Karpukhin , Omer Levy , Jacob Eisenstein , Marjan Ghazvininejad

The challenges facing speech recognition systems, such as variations in pronunciations, adverse audio conditions, and the scarcity of labeled data, emphasize the necessity for a post-processing step that corrects recurring errors. Previous…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Tomer Wullach , Shlomo E. Chazan

Tokenisation is an integral part of the current NLP pipeline. Current tokenisation algorithms such as BPE and Unigram are greedy algorithms -- they make locally optimal decisions without considering the resulting vocabulary as a whole. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Jan Tempus , Philip Whittington , Craig W. Schmidt , Dennis Komm , Tiago Pimentel

This paper describes Picky, a probabilistic agenda-based chart parsing algorithm which uses a technique called {\em probabilistic prediction} to predict which grammar rules are likely to lead to an acceptable parse of the input. Using a…

cmp-lg · Computer Science 2008-02-03 David M. Magerman , Carl Weir

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

Language models typically tokenize text into subwords, using a deterministic, hand-engineered heuristic of combining characters into longer surface-level strings such as 'ing' or whole words. Recent literature has repeatedly shown the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Avijit Thawani , Saurabh Ghanekar , Xiaoyuan Zhu , Jay Pujara

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

This paper proposes a method to optimize tokenization for the performance improvement of already trained downstream models. Our method generates tokenization results attaining lower loss values of a given downstream model on the training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-04-24 Tatsuya Hiraoka , Tomoya Iwakura

The effectiveness of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models largely depends on the vocabulary used at training; small vocabularies can lead to out-of-vocabulary problems -- large ones, to memory issues. Subword (SW) tokenization has been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-02 J. Pourmostafa Roshan Sharami , D. Shterionov , P. Spronck

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

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…

Sound · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Feiyu Shen , Yiwei Guo , Chenpeng Du , Xie Chen , Kai Yu

The best performing transformer-based language models use subword tokenization techniques, such as Byte-Pair-Encoding (BPE). However, these approaches often overlook linguistic principles, such as morphological segmentation, which we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Mikkel Wildner Kildeberg , Emil Allerslev Schledermann , Nicolaj Larsen , Rob van der Goot

Subword tokenization requires balancing computational efficiency and vocabulary coverage, which often leads to suboptimal performance on languages and scripts not prioritized during training. We propose to augment pretrained language models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Jonas F. Lotz , Hendra Setiawan , Stephan Peitz , Yova Kementchedjhieva

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-25 Md Mofijul Islam , Gustavo Aguilar , Pragaash Ponnusamy , Clint Solomon Mathialagan , Chengyuan Ma , Chenlei Guo

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

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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Abraham Toluwase Owodunni , Orevaoghene Ahia , Sachin Kumar

Subword regularization, used widely in NLP, improves model performance by reducing the dependency on exact tokenizations, augmenting the training corpus, and exposing the model to more unique contexts during training. BPE and MaxMatch, two…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-22 Marco Cognetta , Vilém Zouhar , Naoaki Okazaki

The impact of subword tokenization on language model performance is well-documented for perplexity, with finer granularity consistently reducing this intrinsic metric. However, research on how different tokenization schemes affect a model's…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Nishant Luitel , Nirajan Bekoju , Anand Kumar Sah , Subarna Shakya