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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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-04-15 Youri Arkesteijn , Nikhil Saldanha , Bastijn Kostense

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Amos You

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Gunjan Balde , Soumyadeep Roy , Mainack Mondal , Niloy Ganguly

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

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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-05 Jonne Sälevä , Constantine Lignos

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-11-18 Tim Elsner , Paula Usinger , Julius Nehring-Wirxel , Gregor Kobsik , Victor Czech , Yanjiang He , Isaak Lim , Leif Kobbelt

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-05-05 Ivan Provilkov , Dmitrii Emelianenko , Elena Voita

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Alisa Liu , Jonathan Hayase , Valentin Hofmann , Sewoong Oh , Noah A. Smith , Yejin Choi

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Marco Cognetta , Tatsuya Hiraoka , Naoaki Okazaki , Rico Sennrich , Yuval Pinter

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

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…

Sound · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Bohan Li , Feiyu Shen , Yiwei Guo , Shuai Wang , Xie Chen , Kai Yu

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Jan Tempus , Philip Whittington , Craig W. Schmidt , Dennis Komm , Tiago Pimentel

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-25 N J Karthika , Maharaj Brahma , Rohit Saluja , Ganesh Ramakrishnan , Maunendra Sankar Desarkar

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Makesh Narsimhan Sreedhar , Xiangpeng Wan , Yu Cheng , Junjie Hu

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Odunayo Ogundepo , Xinyu Zhang , Jimmy Lin

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-07-24 Anoop Kunchukuttan , Pushpak Bhattacharyya

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Saketh Reddy Vemula , Sandipan Dandapat , Dipti Misra Sharma , Parameswari Krishnamurthy

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Omri Uzan , Craig W. Schmidt , Chris Tanner , Yuval Pinter