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Related papers: Tokenization is Sensitive to Language Variation

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Recent language models have shown impressive multilingual performance, even when not explicitly trained for it. Despite this, there are concerns about the quality of their outputs across different languages. In this paper, we show how…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-23 Aleksandar Petrov , Emanuele La Malfa , Philip H. S. Torr , Adel Bibi

Tokenization, the division of input text into input tokens, is an often overlooked aspect of the large language model (LLM) pipeline and could be the source of useful or harmful inductive biases. Historically, LLMs have relied on byte pair…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Aaditya K. Singh , DJ Strouse

Recent advancements in large language models(LLMs), such as GPT-4 and GPT-4o, have shown exceptional performance, especially in languages with abundant resources like English, thanks to extensive datasets that ensure robust training.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-15 Jin Yang , Zhiqiang Wang , Yanbin Lin , Zunduo Zhao

The number of tokens it takes to encode parallel text in different languages is known to vary. These disparities are called token premiums. Having high token premiums leads to less throughput during training and increases costs at…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Catherine Arnett , Tyler A. Chang , Stella Biderman , Benjamin K. Bergen

Pretraining massively multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) for many languages at once is challenging due to limited model capacity, scarce high-quality data, and compute constraints. Moreover, the lack of language coverage of the…

The necessity of language-specific tokenizers intuitively appears crucial for effective natural language processing, yet empirical analyses on their significance and underlying reasons are lacking. This study explores how language-specific…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Jean Seo , Jaeyoon Kim , SungJoo Byun , Hyopil Shin

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to process information using a proficient internal language consistently, referred to as latent language, which may differ from the input or output languages. However, how the discrepancy between the…

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

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 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

Neural language models typically tokenise input text into sub-word units to achieve an open vocabulary. The standard approach is to use a single canonical tokenisation at both train and test time. We suggest that this approach is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-22 Kris Cao , Laura Rimell

Modern tokenizers employ deterministic algorithms to map text into a single "canonical" token sequence, yet the same string can be encoded as many non-canonical tokenizations using the tokenizer vocabulary. In this work, we investigate the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Brian Siyuan Zheng , Alisa Liu , Orevaoghene Ahia , Jonathan Hayase , Yejin Choi , Noah A. Smith

Speech tokenization serves as the foundation of speech language model (LM), enabling them to perform various tasks such as spoken language modeling, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, etc. Most speech tokenizers are trained independently of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-11 Arnon Turetzky , Yossi Adi

Dialectal data are characterized by linguistic variation that appears small to humans but has a significant impact on the performance of models. This dialect gap has been related to various factors (e.g., data size, economic and social…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Vani Kanjirangat , Tanja Samardžić , Ljiljana Dolamic , Fabio Rinaldi

Prior research has demonstrated noticeable performance gains through the use of probabilistic tokenizations, an approach that involves employing multiple tokenizations of the same input string during the training phase of a language model.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Ashutosh Sathe , Divyanshu Aggarwal , Sunayana Sitaram

Recent large language models (LLM) exhibit sub-optimal performance on low-resource languages, as the training data of these models is usually dominated by English and other high-resource languages. Furthermore, it is challenging to train…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-18 Zoltan Csaki , Pian Pawakapan , Urmish Thakker , Qiantong Xu

Tokenizers provide the fundamental basis through which text is represented and processed by language models (LMs). Despite the importance of tokenization, its role in LM performance and behavior is poorly understood due to the challenge of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Gül Sena Altıntaş , Malikeh Ehghaghi , Brian Lester , Fengyuan Liu , Wanru Zhao , Marco Ciccone , Colin Raffel

When using an LLM to process text outside the training domain(s), an often overlooked factor is vocabulary mismatch, where the general-domain tokenizer fails to capture frequent domain-specific terms, leading to higher token fertility and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Christian Herold , Michael Kozielski , Nicholas Santavas , Yannick Versley , Shahram Khadivi

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Craig W. Schmidt , Varshini Reddy , Haoran Zhang , Alec Alameddine , Omri Uzan , Yuval Pinter , Chris Tanner

Tokenization disparities pose a significant barrier to achieving equitable access to artificial intelligence across linguistically diverse populations. This study conducts a large-scale cross-linguistic evaluation of tokenization efficiency…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Hailay Kidu Teklehaymanot , Wolfgang Nejdl