Related papers: Tokenization is Sensitive to Language Variation

Adapting language models to new data distributions by simple finetuning is challenging. This is due to the rigidity of their subword tokenizers, which typically remain unchanged during adaptation. This inflexibility often leads to…

Tokenisation is a core part of language models (LMs). It involves splitting a character sequence into subwords which are assigned arbitrary indices before being served to the LM. While typically lossless, however, this process may lead to…

In this paper, we investigate the phenomena of "selection biases" in Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on problems where models are tasked with choosing the optimal option from an ordered sequence. We delve into biases related to…

Transformers, the backbone of modern large language models (LLMs), face inherent architectural limitations that impede their reasoning capabilities. Unlike recurrent networks, Transformers lack recurrent connections, confining them to…

Contextual embedding-based language models trained on large data sets, such as BERT and RoBERTa, provide strong performance across a wide range of tasks and are ubiquitous in modern NLP. It has been observed that fine-tuning these models on…

While the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have been studied in both Simplified and Traditional Chinese, it is yet unclear whether LLMs exhibit differential performance when prompted in these two variants of written Chinese.…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have excelled in various tasks but perform better in high-resource scenarios, which presents challenges in low-resource scenarios. Data scarcity and the inherent difficulty of adapting LLMs to specific tasks…

Traditional greedy tokenization methods have been a critical step in Natural Language Processing (NLP), influencing how text is converted into tokens and directly impacting model performance. While subword tokenizers like Byte-Pair Encoding…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong performance in machine translation (MT). However, most prior work focuses on improving or benchmarking translation quality, offering limited insight into when and why LLM-based…

Language models (LMs) are bound to their tokenizer, which maps raw text to a sequence of vocabulary items (tokens). This restricts their flexibility: for example, LMs trained primarily on English may still perform well in other natural and…

The performance of large language models (LLMs) is significantly affected by the quality and composition of their pre-training data, which is inherently diverse, spanning various languages, sources, and topics. Effectively integrating these…

Large language models (LLMs) often encode word-form variation (e.g., walk vs. walked) as linear directions in the embedding space. However, standard tokenization algorithms treat such variants as distinct words with different vocabulary…

Tokenizer is an essential component for large language models (LLMs), and a tokenizer with a high compression rate can improve the model's representation and processing efficiency. However, the tokenizer cannot ensure high compression rate…

Large language models (LLMs) reason over discrete token ID sequences, yet modern subword tokenizers routinely produce non-unique encodings: multiple token ID sequences can detokenize to identical surface strings. This representational…

Tokenizing raw texts into word units is an essential pre-processing step for critical tasks in the NLP pipeline such as tagging, parsing, named entity recognition, and more. For most languages, this tokenization step straightforward.…

We introduce a scaling law for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) under fixed compute budgets that explicitly accounts for data composition. Conventional approaches measure training data solely by total tokens, yet the number of…

Modern language models operate on subword-tokenized text in order to make a trade-off between model size, inference speed, and vocabulary coverage. A side effect of this is that, during inference, models are evaluated by measuring the…

Quantization techniques are widely used to improve inference speed and deployment of large language models. While a wide body of work examines the impact of quantization on LLMs in English, none have evaluated across languages. We conduct a…

Multilingual language models (MLLMs) are crucial for handling text across various languages, yet they often show performance disparities due to differences in resource availability and linguistic characteristics. While the impact of…

Language models perform differently across languages. It has been previously suggested that morphological typology may explain some of this variability (Cotterell et al., 2018). We replicate previous analyses and find additional new…