Related papers: Parity-Aware Byte-Pair Encoding: Improving Cross-l…
In this paper, we aim to do code completion based on implementing a Neural Network from Li et. al.. Our contribution is that we use an encoding that is in-between character and word encoding called Byte Pair Encoding (BPE). We use this on…
Tokenization is a critical preprocessing step in large language model pipelines, yet widely-used implementations remain CPU-bound and suboptimal for batch inference workflows on GPU. We present BlockBPE, a parallel GPU implementation of…
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…
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…
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…
We introduce three simple randomized variants of byte pair encoding (BPE) and explore whether randomizing the selection of merge operations substantially affects a downstream machine translation task. We focus on translation into…
In language processing, transformers benefit greatly from text being condensed. This is achieved through a larger vocabulary that captures word fragments instead of plain characters. This is often done with Byte Pair Encoding. In the…
Subword segmentation is widely used to address the open vocabulary problem in machine translation. The dominant approach to subword segmentation is Byte Pair Encoding (BPE), which keeps the most frequent words intact while splitting the…
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 assumption across nearly all language model (LM) tokenization schemes is that tokens should be subwords, i.e., contained within word boundaries. While providing a seemingly reasonable inductive bias, is this common practice limiting the…
We explore threshold vocabulary trimming in Byte-Pair Encoding subword tokenization, a postprocessing step that replaces rare subwords with their component subwords. The technique is available in popular tokenization libraries but has not…
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…
Discretizing speech into tokens and generating them by a decoder-only model have been a promising direction for text-to-speech (TTS) and spoken language modeling (SLM). To shorten the sequence length of speech tokens, acoustic byte-pair…
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…
Tokenization plays a pivotal role in multilingual NLP. However, existing tokenizers are often skewed towards high-resource languages, limiting their effectiveness for linguistically diverse and morphologically rich languages such as those…
Subword tokenization schemes are the dominant technique used in current NLP models. However, such schemes can be rigid and tokenizers built on one corpus do not adapt well to other parallel corpora. It has also been observed that in…
Tokenization is a crucial step in information retrieval, especially for lexical matching algorithms, where the quality of indexable tokens directly impacts the effectiveness of a retrieval system. Since different languages have unique…
We explore the use of segments learnt using Byte Pair Encoding (referred to as BPE units) as basic units for statistical machine translation between related languages and compare it with orthographic syllables, which are currently the best…
The relationship between tokenizer algorithm (e.g., Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE), Unigram), morphological alignment, tokenization quality (e.g., compression efficiency), and downstream performance remains largely unclear, particularly for…
While subword tokenizers such as BPE and WordPiece are typically used to build vocabularies for NLP models, the method of decoding text into a sequence of tokens from these vocabularies is often left unspecified, or ill-suited to the method…