Related papers: When Every Token Counts: Optimal Segmentation for …
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…
Language models can largely benefit from efficient tokenization. However, they still mostly utilize the classical BPE algorithm, a simple and reliable method. This has been shown to cause such issues as under-trained tokens and sub-optimal…
While subword tokenizers such as BPE and WordPiece are typically used to build vocabularies for NLP models, the method of decoding text into a sequence of tokens from these vocabularies is often left unspecified, or ill-suited to the method…
Tokenization significantly influences language models(LMs)' performance. This paper traces the evolution of tokenizers from word-level to subword-level, analyzing how they balance tokens and types to enhance model adaptability while…
Tokenization is the process of encoding strings into tokens of a fixed vocabulary size, and is widely utilized in Natural Language Processing applications. The leading tokenization algorithm today is Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE), which…
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 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…
We explore threshold vocabulary trimming in Byte-Pair Encoding subword tokenization, a postprocessing step that replaces rare subwords with their component subwords. The technique is available in popular tokenization libraries but has not…
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…
Despite it being the cornerstone of BPE, the most common tokenization algorithm, the importance of compression in the tokenization process is still unclear. In this paper, we argue for the theoretical importance of compression, that can be…
Tokenization is the first step in modern neural language model pipelines where an input text is converted to a sequence of subword tokens. We introduce from first principles a finite-state transduction framework which can efficiently encode…
Scaling laws enable the optimal selection of data amount and language model size, yet the impact of the data unit, the token, on this relationship remains underexplored. In this work, we systematically investigate how the information…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
Existing Machine Translation (MT) research often suggests a single, fixed set of hyperparameters for word segmentation models, symmetric Byte Pair Encoding (BPE), which applies the same number of merge operations (NMO) to train tokenizers…
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…
Since traditional tokenizers are isolated from a downstream task and model, they cannot output an appropriate tokenization depending on the task and model, although recent studies imply that the appropriate tokenization improves the…