Related papers: Tokenization as Finite-State Transduction

Tokenization is a foundational step in natural language processing (NLP) tasks, bridging raw text and language models. Existing tokenization approaches like Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) originate from the field of data compression, and it has…

State-of-the-art language models are autoregressive and operate on subword units known as tokens. Specifically, one must encode the conditioning string into a list of tokens before passing to the language models for next-token prediction.…

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…

In this paper, we formalize practical byte pair encoding tokenization as it is used in large language models and other NLP systems, in particular we formally define and investigate the semantics of the SentencePiece and HuggingFace…

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…

Tokenization is the first -- and often least scrutinized -- step of most NLP pipelines. Standard algorithms for learning tokenizers rely on frequency-based objectives, which favor languages dominant in the training data and consequently…

Tokenization is a crucial step in processing protein sequences for machine learning models, as proteins are complex sequences of amino acids that require meaningful segmentation to capture their functional and structural properties.…

Pre-tokenization, the initial step in many modern tokenization pipelines, segments text into smaller units called pretokens, typically splitting on whitespace and punctuation. While this process encourages having full, individual words as…

Traditional greedy tokenization methods have been a critical step in Natural Language Processing (NLP), influencing how text is converted into tokens and directly impacting model performance. While subword tokenizers like Byte-Pair Encoding…

Subword tokenization methods, such as Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE), significantly impact the performance and efficiency of large language models (LLMs). The standard approach involves training a general-purpose tokenizer that uniformly…

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…

Multimodal Large Language Models have made significant strides in integrating visual and textual information, yet they often struggle with effectively aligning these modalities. We introduce a novel image tokenizer that bridges this gap by…

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…

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…

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…

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…

What are the units of text that we want to model? From bytes to multi-word expressions, text can be analyzed and generated at many granularities. Until recently, most natural language processing (NLP) models operated over words, treating…

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…

Subword tokenization methods like Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) are widely used in large language models due to their balance of vocabulary compactness and representational power. However, they suffer from inefficiencies in representing rare…

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…