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Related papers: Morphological Typology in BPE Subword Productivity…

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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

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

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.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-27 Burak Suyunu , Enes Taylan , Arzucan Özgür

Theoretical work in morphological typology offers the possibility of measuring morphological diversity on a continuous scale. However, literature in Natural Language Processing (NLP) typically labels a whole language with a strict type of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-09 Arturo Oncevay , Duygu Ataman , Niels van Berkel , Barry Haddow , Alexandra Birch , Johannes Bjerva

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

Despite major advances in multilingual modeling, large quality disparities persist across languages. Besides the obvious impact of uneven training resources, typological properties have also been proposed to determine the intrinsic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Vitalii Hirak , Jaap Jumelet , Arianna Bisazza

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

Multilingual modelling can improve machine translation for low-resource languages, partly through shared subword representations. This paper studies the role of subword segmentation in cross-lingual transfer. We systematically compare the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-01 Francois Meyer , Jan Buys

Almost all existing machine translation models are built on top of character-based vocabularies: characters, subwords or words. Rare characters from noisy text or character-rich languages such as Japanese and Chinese however can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-12-09 Changhan Wang , Kyunghyun Cho , Jiatao Gu

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Alexander P. Morgan

Subword tokenization has become the de-facto standard for tokenization, although comparative evaluations of subword vocabulary quality across languages are scarce. Existing evaluation studies focus on the effect of a tokenization algorithm…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-23 Lisa Beinborn , Yuval Pinter

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

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

We incorporate morphological supervision into character language models (CLMs) via multitasking and show that this addition improves bits-per-character (BPC) performance across 24 languages, even when the morphology data and language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-06-14 Terra Blevins , Luke Zettlemoyer

Linguistic typology aims to capture structural and semantic variation across the world's languages. A large-scale typology could provide excellent guidance for multilingual Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly for languages that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-28 Edoardo Maria Ponti , Helen O'Horan , Yevgeni Berzak , Ivan Vulić , Roi Reichart , Thierry Poibeau , Ekaterina Shutova , Anna Korhonen

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

Tokenization is a critical part of modern NLP pipelines. However, contemporary tokenizers for Large Language Models are based on statistical analysis of text corpora, without much consideration to the linguistic features. I propose a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Haris Jabbar

Contemporary deep learning models effectively handle languages with diverse morphology despite not being directly integrated into them. Morphology and word order are closely linked, with the latter incorporated into transformer-based models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Poulami Ghosh , Shikhar Vashishth , Raj Dabre , Pushpak Bhattacharyya

Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) serves as a foundation method for text tokenization in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field. Despite its wide adoption, the original BPE algorithm harbors an inherent flaw: it inadvertently introduces a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-14 Haoran Lian , Yizhe Xiong , Jianwei Niu , Shasha Mo , Zhenpeng Su , Zijia Lin , Hui Chen , Peng Liu , Jungong Han , Guiguang Ding

Subword tokenization is the de facto standard for tokenization in neural language models and machine translation systems. Three advantages are frequently cited in favor of subwords: shorter encoding of frequent tokens, compositionality of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-15 Benoist Wolleb , Romain Silvestri , Giorgos Vernikos , Ljiljana Dolamic , Andrei Popescu-Belis