Related papers: Comparative analysis of subword tokenization appro…

Large language models (LLMs) for code rely on subword tokenizers, such as byte-pair encoding (BPE), learned from mixed natural language text and programming language code but driven by statistics rather than grammar. As a result,…

Tokenization is a critical part of modern NLP pipelines. However, contemporary tokenizers for Large Language Models are based on statistical analysis of text corpora, without much consideration to the linguistic features. I propose a…

The prevalent use of Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) in Large Language Models (LLMs) facilitates robust handling of subword units and avoids issues of out-of-vocabulary words. Despite its success, a critical challenge persists: long tokens, rich…

Small Language Models (SLMs) offer efficient alternatives to LLMs for specific domains. The 2023 TinyStories study developed an English dataset that allows SLMs with 1 to 10 million parameters to produce coherent outputs. Our research…

Tokenization is the first -- and often least scrutinized -- step of most NLP pipelines. Standard algorithms for learning tokenizers rely on frequency-based objectives, which favor languages dominant in the training data and consequently…

Subword segmenters like BPE operate as a preprocessing step in neural machine translation and other (conditional) language models. They are applied to datasets before training, so translation or text generation quality relies on the quality…

Traditionally, NLP performance improvement has been focused on improving models and increasing the number of model parameters. NLP vocabulary construction has remained focused on maximizing the number of words represented through subword…

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…

For different language pairs, word-level neural machine translation (NMT) models with a fixed-size vocabulary suffer from the same problem of representing out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. The common practice usually replaces all these rare or…

Large language model (LLM) tokenizers act as structured compressors: by mapping text to discrete token sequences, they determine token count (and thus compute and context usage) and the statistical structure seen by downstream models.…

The choice of tokenizer can profoundly impact language model performance, yet accessible and reliable evaluations of tokenizer quality remain an open challenge. Inspired by scaling consistency, we show that smaller models can accurately…

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…

The use of subword embedding has proved to be a major innovation in Neural Machine Translation (NMT). It helps NMT to learn better context vectors for Low Resource Languages (LRLs) so as to predict the target words by better modelling the…

Subword tokenization has become the de-facto standard for tokenization, although comparative evaluations of subword vocabulary quality across languages are scarce. Existing evaluation studies focus on the effect of a tokenization algorithm…

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…

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…

Byte pair encoding (BPE) emerges as an effective tokenization method for tackling the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) challenge in various natural language and speech processing tasks. Recent research highlights the dependency of BPE subword…

State-of-the-art language models are autoregressive and operate on subword units known as tokens. Specifically, one must encode the conditioning string into a list of tokens before passing to the language models for next-token prediction.…

Multilingual modelling can improve machine translation for low-resource languages, partly through shared subword representations. This paper studies the role of subword segmentation in cross-lingual transfer. We systematically compare the…

Subword tokenization is a common method for vocabulary building in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models. However, increasingly complex tasks have revealed its disadvantages. First, a vocabulary cannot be modified once it is learned,…