Related papers: ByteSpan: Information-Driven Subword Tokenisation

In this work, we show a fundamental limitation in vocabulary adaptation approaches that use Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenization scheme for fine-tuning pretrained language models (PLMs) to expert domains. Current approaches trivially…

Discrete audio tokens derived from self-supervised learning models have gained widespread usage in speech generation. However, current practice of directly utilizing audio tokens poses challenges for sequence modeling due to the length of…

Tokenization is an important first step in Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipelines because it decides how models learn and represent linguistic information. However, current subword tokenizers like SentencePiece or HuggingFace BPE are…

When used with deep learning, the symbolic music modality is often coupled with language model architectures. To do so, the music needs to be tokenized, i.e. converted into a sequence of discrete tokens. This can be achieved by different…

Tokenisation is an integral part of the current NLP pipeline. Current tokenisation algorithms such as BPE and Unigram are greedy algorithms -- they make locally optimal decisions without considering the resulting vocabulary as a whole. We…

Most current popular subword tokenizers are trained based on word frequency statistics over a corpus, without considering information about co-occurrence or context. Nevertheless, the resulting vocabularies are used in language models'…

We investigate the problem of segmenting unlabeled speech into word-like units and clustering these to create a lexicon. Prior work can be categorized into two frameworks. Bottom-up methods first determine boundaries and then cluster the…

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…

Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) is an algorithm commonly used in Natural Language Processing to build a vocabulary of subwords, which has been recently applied to symbolic music. Given that symbolic music can differ significantly from text,…

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,…

The effectiveness of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models largely depends on the vocabulary used at training; small vocabularies can lead to out-of-vocabulary problems -- large ones, to memory issues. Subword (SW) tokenization has been…

Representing speech as discrete tokens provides a framework for transforming speech into a format that closely resembles text, thus enabling the use of speech as an input to the widely successful large language models (LLMs). Currently,…

Subword tokenizers trained on multilingual corpora naturally produce overlapping tokens across languages. Does token overlap facilitate cross-lingual transfer or instead introduce interference between languages? Prior work offers mixed…

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…

Tokenization is a crucial step in NLP, especially with the rise of large language models (LLMs), impacting downstream performance, computational cost, and efficiency. Existing LLMs rely on the classical Byte-pair Encoding (BPE) algorithm…

Recent advances in generative AI have been largely driven by large language models (LLMs), deep neural networks that operate over discrete units called tokens. To represent text, the vast majority of LLMs use words or word fragments as the…

Subword tokenization requires balancing computational efficiency and vocabulary coverage, which often leads to suboptimal performance on languages and scripts not prioritized during training. We propose to augment pretrained language models…

Subword tokenization is a key design choice for modern language models, including large language models (LLMs), with byte- and character-level BPE serving as a widely used baseline. Standard BPE selects merges by raw pair frequency, which…

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…

Tokenization serves as a foundational step for Large Language Models (LLMs) to process text. In new domains or languages, the inefficiency of the tokenizer will slow down the training and generation of LLM. The mismatch in vocabulary also…