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Tokenization is a critical preprocessing step for large language models (LLMs), directly impacting training efficiency and downstream performance. General-purpose tokenizers trained predominantly on English and Latin-script languages…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Mark Kashirskiy , Artiom Lipinski , Ilya Makarov

Gender-inclusive NLP research has documented the harmful limitations of gender binary-centric large language models (LLM), such as the inability to correctly use gender-diverse English neopronouns (e.g., xe, zir, fae). While data scarcity…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Anaelia Ovalle , Ninareh Mehrabi , Palash Goyal , Jwala Dhamala , Kai-Wei Chang , Richard Zemel , Aram Galstyan , Yuval Pinter , Rahul Gupta

Tokenizers play a crucial role in determining the performance, training efficiency, and the inference cost of Large Language Models (LLMs). Designing effective tokenizers for multilingual LLMs is particularly challenging due to diverse…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Souvik Rana , Arul Menezes , Ashish Kulkarni , Chandra Khatri , Shubham Agarwal

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Yifan Hu , Frank Liang , Dachuan Zhao , Jonathan Geuter , Varshini Reddy , Craig W. Schmidt , Chris Tanner

Prompt-based methods have been successfully applied to multilingual pretrained language models for zero-shot cross-lingual understanding. However, most previous studies primarily focused on sentence-level classification tasks, and only a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Bolei Ma , Ercong Nie , Shuzhou Yuan , Helmut Schmid , Michael Färber , Frauke Kreuter , Hinrich Schütze

Semantic evaluation in low-resource languages remains a major challenge in NLP. While sentence transformers have shown strong performance in high-resource settings, their effectiveness in Indic languages is underexplored due to a lack of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Nishant Tanksale , Tanmay Kokate , Darshan Gohad , Sarvadnyaa Barate , Raviraj Joshi

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

Sub-word segmentation is an essential pre-processing step for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). Existing work has shown that neural sub-word segmenters are better than Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE), however, they are inefficient as they require…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Haiyue Song , Raj Dabre , Chenhui Chu , Sadao Kurohashi , Eiichiro Sumita

In this paper, we formalize practical byte pair encoding tokenization as it is used in large language models and other NLP systems, in particular we formally define and investigate the semantics of the SentencePiece and HuggingFace…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Martin Berglund , Brink van der Merwe

Subword tokenization methods like Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) are widely used in large language models due to their balance of vocabulary compactness and representational power. However, they suffer from inefficiencies in representing rare…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Rares Dolga , Lucas Maystre , Tudor Berariu , David Barber

Tokenization is fundamental to Natural Language Processing (NLP), directly impacting model efficiency and linguistic fidelity. While Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) is widely used in Large Language Models (LLMs), it often disregards morpheme…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Ehsaneddin Asgari , Yassine El Kheir , Mohammad Ali Sadraei Javaheri

The lack of annotated data in many languages is a well-known challenge within the field of multilingual natural language processing (NLP). Therefore, many recent studies focus on zero-shot transfer learning and joint training across…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-12-24 Niels van der Heijden , Samira Abnar , Ekaterina Shutova

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Edward Gow-Smith , Harish Tayyar Madabushi , Carolina Scarton , Aline Villavicencio

What are the units of text that we want to model? From bytes to multi-word expressions, text can be analyzed and generated at many granularities. Until recently, most natural language processing (NLP) models operated over words, treating…

The success of pretrained transformer language models (LMs) in natural language processing has led to a wide range of pretraining setups. In particular, these models employ a variety of subword tokenization methods, most notably byte-pair…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Kaj Bostrom , Greg Durrett

Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) is a widely used tokenization algorithm, whose tokens cannot extend across pre-tokenization boundaries, functionally limiting it to representing at most full words. The BoundlessBPE and SuperBPE algorithms extend…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Craig W. Schmidt , Chris Tanner , Yuval Pinter

Choosing an appropriate tokenization scheme is often a bottleneck in low-resource cross-lingual transfer. To understand the downstream implications of text representation choices, we perform a comparative analysis on language models having…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Md Mushfiqur Rahman , Fardin Ahsan Sakib , Fahim Faisal , Antonios Anastasopoulos

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

This paper evaluates the performance of several modern subword segmentation methods in a low-resource neural machine translation setting. We compare segmentations produced by applying BPE at the token or sentence level with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-17 Jonne Sälevä , Constantine Lignos

Tokenization underlies every large language model, yet it remains an under-theorized and inconsistently designed component. Common subword approaches such as Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) offer scalability but often misalign with linguistic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Sawsan Alqahtani , Mir Tafseer Nayeem , Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar , Tasnim Mohiuddin , M Saiful Bari