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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

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

Subword tokenization is a commonly used input pre-processing step in most recent NLP models. However, it limits the models' ability to leverage end-to-end task learning. Its frequency-based vocabulary creation compromises tokenization in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-25 Md Mofijul Islam , Gustavo Aguilar , Pragaash Ponnusamy , Clint Solomon Mathialagan , Chengyuan Ma , Chenlei Guo

Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) is a widely used method for subword tokenization, with origins in grammar-based text compression. It is employed in a variety of language processing tasks such as machine translation or large language model (LLM)…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-11-14 László Kozma , Johannes Voderholzer

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

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

In this work, we show a fundamental limitation in vocabulary adaptation approaches that use Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenization scheme for fine-tuning pretrained language models (PLMs) to expert domains. Current approaches trivially…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Gunjan Balde , Soumyadeep Roy , Mainack Mondal , Niloy Ganguly

Subword tokenization critically affects Natural Language Processing (NLP) performance, yet its behavior in morphologically rich and low-resource language families remains under-explored. This study systematically compares three subword…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Nuo Xu , Ahrii Kim

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

Tokenization is associated with many poorly understood shortcomings in language models (LMs), yet remains an important component for long sequence scaling purposes. This work studies how tokenization impacts model performance by analyzing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Buu Phan , Brandon Amos , Itai Gat , Marton Havasi , Matthew Muckley , Karen Ullrich

The challenges facing speech recognition systems, such as variations in pronunciations, adverse audio conditions, and the scarcity of labeled data, emphasize the necessity for a post-processing step that corrects recurring errors. Previous…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Tomer Wullach , Shlomo E. Chazan

The impact of subword tokenization on language model performance is well-documented for perplexity, with finer granularity consistently reducing this intrinsic metric. However, research on how different tokenization schemes affect a model's…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Nishant Luitel , Nirajan Bekoju , Anand Kumar Sah , Subarna Shakya

In neural machine translation (NMT), it is has become standard to translate using subword units to allow for an open vocabulary and improve accuracy on infrequent words. Byte-pair encoding (BPE) and its variants are the predominant approach…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-10-23 Elizabeth Salesky , Andrew Runge , Alex Coda , Jan Niehues , Graham Neubig

This study investigates the impact of morphological typology on tokenization and language modeling performance. We focus on languages with synthetic and analytical morphological structures and examine their productivity when tokenized using…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Iñigo Parra

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Dong Liu , Yanxuan Yu

Efficiency and safety of Large Language Models (LLMs), among other factors, rely on the quality of tokenization. A good tokenizer not only improves inference speed and language understanding but also provides extra defense against jailbreak…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Pavel Chizhov , Egor Bogomolov , Ivan P. Yamshchikov

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

Tokenization is fundamental in assembly code analysis, impacting intrinsic characteristics like vocabulary size, semantic coverage, and extrinsic performance in downstream tasks. Despite its significance, tokenization in the context of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Ahmed Mostafa , Raisul Arefin Nahid , Samuel Mulder

We introduce Tokenization with Split Trees (ToaST), a subword tokenization method that directly optimizes compression under a new recursive inference procedure. ToaST greedily splits each pretoken into a full binary tree using precomputed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Craig W. Schmidt , Michael Krumdick , Adam Wiemerslage , Seth Ebner , Varshini Reddy , Yuval Pinter , Chris Tanner

Recent dynamic tokenisation methods operate directly on bytes and pool their latent representations into patches. This bears similarities to computational models of word segmentation that determine lexical boundaries using spikes in an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Zébulon Goriely , Suchir Salhan , Pietro Lesci , Julius Cheng , Paula Buttery