Related papers: Segmentation Beyond Defaults: Asymmetrical Byte Pa…

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…

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…

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is an open vocabulary problem. As a result, dealing with the words not occurring during training (a.k.a. out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words) have long been a fundamental challenge for NMT systems. The predominant…

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…

Most neural machine translation systems are built upon subword units extracted by methods such as Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) or wordpiece. However, the choice of number of merge operations is generally made by following existing recipes. In…

Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) is a popular algorithm used for tokenizing data in NLP, despite being devised initially as a compression method. BPE appears to be a greedy algorithm at face value, but the underlying optimization problem that BPE…

This paper introduces Dynamic Programming Encoding (DPE), a new segmentation algorithm for tokenizing sentences into subword units. We view the subword segmentation of output sentences as a latent variable that should be marginalized out…

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…

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…

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,…

In neural machine translation (NMT), it is has become standard to translate using subword units to allow for an open vocabulary and improve accuracy on infrequent words. Byte-pair encoding (BPE) and its variants are the predominant approach…

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…

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…

Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) is a widely used method for subword tokenization, with origins in grammar-based text compression. It is employed in a variety of language processing tasks such as machine translation or large language model (LLM)…

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…

Traditional greedy tokenization methods have been a critical step in Natural Language Processing (NLP), influencing how text is converted into tokens and directly impacting model performance. While subword tokenizers like Byte-Pair Encoding…

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…

Morphologically-rich polysynthetic languages present a challenge for NLP systems due to data sparsity, and a common strategy to handle this issue is to apply subword segmentation. We investigate a wide variety of supervised and unsupervised…

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…