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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…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Martin Berglund , Brink van der Merwe

Traditionally, NLP performance improvement has been focused on improving models and increasing the number of model parameters. NLP vocabulary construction has remained focused on maximizing the number of words represented through subword…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-04-26 Sandeep Mehta , Darpan Shah , Ravindra Kulkarni , Cornelia Caragea

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

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

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.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Buu Phan , Marton Havasi , Matthew Muckley , Karen Ullrich

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

Tokenization is fundamental to Natural Language Processing (NLP), directly impacting model efficiency and linguistic fidelity. While Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) is widely used in Large Language Models (LLMs), it often disregards morpheme…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Ehsaneddin Asgari , Yassine El Kheir , Mohammad Ali Sadraei Javaheri

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Craig W. Schmidt , Varshini Reddy , Chris Tanner , Yuval Pinter

Large Language Models (LLMs) are gaining popularity and improving rapidly. Tokenizers are crucial components of natural language processing, especially for LLMs. Tokenizers break down input text into tokens that models can easily process…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Tandin Wangchuk , Tad Gonsalves

This paper presents a comprehensive examination of the impact of tokenization strategies and vocabulary sizes on the performance of Arabic language models in downstream natural language processing tasks. Our investigation focused on the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Mohamed Taher Alrefaie , Nour Eldin Morsy , Nada Samir

Large language models (LLMs) for code rely on subword tokenizers, such as byte-pair encoding (BPE), learned from mixed natural language text and programming language code but driven by statistics rather than grammar. As a result,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Yinxi Li , Yuntian Deng , Pengyu Nie

Tokenization is a fundamental preprocessing step for almost all NLP tasks. In this paper, we propose efficient algorithms for the WordPiece tokenization used in BERT, from single-word tokenization to general text (e.g., sentence)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Xinying Song , Alex Salcianu , Yang Song , Dave Dopson , Denny Zhou

Language models typically tokenize raw text into sequences of subword identifiers from a predefined vocabulary, a process inherently sensitive to typographical errors, length variations, and largely oblivious to the internal structure of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Yekun Chai , Yewei Fang , Qiwei Peng , Xuhong Li

While many languages possess processes of joining two or more words to create compound words, previous studies have been typically limited only to languages with excessively productive compound formation (e.g., German, Dutch) and there is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Benjamin Minixhofer , Jonas Pfeiffer , Ivan Vulić

Deep neural-network-based language models (LMs) are increasingly applied to large-scale protein sequence data to predict protein function. However, being largely black-box models and thus challenging to interpret, current protein LM…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2024-08-06 Mai Ha Vu , Rahmad Akbar , Philippe A. Robert , Bartlomiej Swiatczak , Victor Greiff , Geir Kjetil Sandve , Dag Trygve Truslew Haug

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…

In recent years, language models have become increasingly larger and more complex. However, the input representations for these models continue to rely on simple and greedy subword tokenization methods. In this paper, we propose a novel…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-14 David Samuel , Lilja Øvrelid

As a cornerstone in language modeling, tokenization involves segmenting text inputs into pre-defined atomic units. Conventional statistical tokenizers often disrupt constituent boundaries within words, thereby corrupting semantic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Qingyang Zhu , Xiang Hu , Pengyu Ji , Wei Wu , Kewei Tu

Tokenization is a fundamental step in natural language processing (NLP) and other sequence modeling domains, where the choice of vocabulary size significantly impacts model performance. Despite its importance, selecting an optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Yanjin He , Qingkai Zeng , Meng Jiang

Large language models have made remarkable progress in the field of molecular science, particularly in understanding and generating functional small molecules. This success is largely attributed to the effectiveness of molecular…

Biomolecules · Quantitative Biology 2025-03-14 Zicheng Ma , Chuanliu Fan , Zhicong Wang , Zhenyu Chen , Xiaohan Lin , Yanheng Li , Shihao Feng , Jun Zhang , Ziqiang Cao , Yi Qin Gao