Related papers: SuperBPE: Space Travel for Language Models

One of the challenges with finetuning pretrained language models (PLMs) is that their tokenizer is optimized for the language(s) it was pretrained on, but brittle when it comes to previously unseen variations in the data. This can for…

Tokenization, a crucial initial step in natural language processing, is governed by several key parameters, such as the tokenization algorithm, vocabulary size, pre-tokenization strategy, inference strategy, and training data corpus. This…

Large pretrained language models (PLMs) typically tokenize the input string into contiguous subwords before any pretraining or inference. However, previous studies have claimed that this form of subword tokenization is inadequate for…

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…

Variation in language is ubiquitous and often systematically linked to regional, social, and contextual factors. Tokenizers split texts into smaller units and might behave differently for less common linguistic forms. This might affect…

The application of large language models (LLMs) to chemistry is frequently hampered by a "tokenization bottleneck", where tokenizers tuned on general-domain text tend to fragment chemical representations such as SMILES into semantically…

The standard BERT adopts subword-based tokenization, which may break a word into two or more wordpieces (e.g., converting "lossless" to "loss" and "less"). This will bring inconvenience in following situations: (1) what is the best way to…

Segmentation remains an important preprocessing step both in languages where "words" or other important syntactic/semantic units (like morphemes) are not clearly delineated by white space, as well as when dealing with continuous speech…

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…

Subwords have become the standard units of text in NLP, enabling efficient open-vocabulary models. With algorithms like byte-pair encoding (BPE), subword segmentation is viewed as a preprocessing step applied to the corpus before training.…

Many NLP applications, such as biomedical data and technical support, have 10-100 million tokens of in-domain data and limited computational resources for learning from it. How should we train a language model in this scenario? Most…

The pursuit of universal black-box optimization (BBO) algorithms is a longstanding goal. However, unlike domains such as language or vision, where scaling structured data has driven generalization, progress in offline BBO remains hindered…

We present three innovations in tokenization and subword segmentation. First, we propose to use unsupervised morphological analysis with Morfessor as pre-tokenization. Second, we present an algebraic method for obtaining subword embeddings…

Learning to construct text representations in end-to-end systems can be difficult, as natural languages are highly compositional and task-specific annotated datasets are often limited in size. Methods for directly supervising language…

Tokenization is an important preprocessing step in the training and inference of large language models (LLMs). While there has been extensive research on the expressive power of the neural achitectures used in LLMs, the impact of…

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…

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…

By processing electronic health records (EHRs) as natural language sequences, large language models (LLMs) have shown potential in clinical prediction tasks such as mortality prediction and phenotyping. However, longitudinal or highly…

Masked language modeling, widely used in discriminative language model (e.g., BERT) pretraining, commonly adopts a random masking strategy. However, random masking does not consider the importance of the different words in the sentence…

Phones and their context-dependent variants have been the standard modeling units for conventional speech recognition systems, while characters and subwords have demonstrated their effectiveness for end-to-end recognition systems. We…