Related papers: Morphological Typology in BPE Subword Productivity…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…