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The success of pretrained transformer language models (LMs) in natural language processing has led to a wide range of pretraining setups. In particular, these models employ a variety of subword tokenization methods, most notably byte-pair…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Kaj Bostrom , Greg Durrett

We present BPEmb, a collection of pre-trained subword unit embeddings in 275 languages, based on Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE). In an evaluation using fine-grained entity typing as testbed, BPEmb performs competitively, and for some languages…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-10-09 Benjamin Heinzerling , Michael Strube

Tokenization significantly influences language models(LMs)' performance. This paper traces the evolution of tokenizers from word-level to subword-level, analyzing how they balance tokens and types to enhance model adaptability while…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-04 Jinbiao Yang

Language models can largely benefit from efficient tokenization. However, they still mostly utilize the classical BPE algorithm, a simple and reliable method. This has been shown to cause such issues as under-trained tokens and sub-optimal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Pavel Chizhov , Catherine Arnett , Elizaveta Korotkova , Ivan P. Yamshchikov

Tokenization plays a critical role in language modeling, yet existing approaches such as Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) or WordPiece operate purely on frequency statistics, ignoring the underlying semantic structure of text. This leads to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Dong Liu , Yanxuan Yu

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Azam Nouri

Standard Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenization compresses text by pairing a learned token vocabulary with a detailed merge list. Recent work has shown that this merge list exposes a potential attack surface for extracting information about…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Tomohiro Sawada , Kartik Goyal

We introduce a morpheme-aware subword tokenization method that utilizes sub-character decomposition to address the challenges of applying Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) to Korean, a language characterized by its rich morphology and unique writing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Taehee Jeon , Bongseok Yang , Changhwan Kim , Yoonseob Lim

Existing Machine Translation (MT) research often suggests a single, fixed set of hyperparameters for word segmentation models, symmetric Byte Pair Encoding (BPE), which applies the same number of merge operations (NMO) to train tokenizers…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Saumitra Yadav , Manish Shrivastava

Subword regularization methods such as BPE dropout are typically applied only during fine-tuning, while pretraining is usually done with deterministic tokenization. This creates a potential segmentation mismatch between pretraining and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Ruan Visser , Trienko Grobler , Marcel Dunaiski

Tokenization is a critical preprocessing step for large language models (LLMs), directly impacting training efficiency and downstream performance. General-purpose tokenizers trained predominantly on English and Latin-script languages…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Mark Kashirskiy , Artiom Lipinski , Ilya Makarov

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

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

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

This paper presents a comprehensive examination of the impact of tokenization strategies and vocabulary sizes on the performance of Arabic language models in downstream natural language processing tasks. Our investigation focused on the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Mohamed Taher Alrefaie , Nour Eldin Morsy , Nada Samir

Tokenisation is the first step in almost all NLP tasks, and state-of-the-art transformer-based language models all use subword tokenisation algorithms to process input text. Existing algorithms have problems, often producing tokenisations…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Edward Gow-Smith , Harish Tayyar Madabushi , Carolina Scarton , Aline Villavicencio

Nepali, a low-resource language spoken by over 32 million people, continues to face challenges in natural language processing (NLP) due to its complex grammar, agglutinative morphology, and limited availability of high-quality corpora. Most…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Adarsha Shrestha , Basanta Pokharel , Binit Shrestha , Smriti Adhikari , Dinesh Gothe

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Craig W. Schmidt , Varshini Reddy , Chris Tanner , Yuval Pinter

Multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) requires tokenization that efficiently covers many writing systems. Byte-level BPE (BBPE) using UTF-8 is widely adopted for its language-agnostic design and full Unicode coverage, but its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Hyunsik Kim , Haeri Kim , Munhak Lee , Kyungmin Lee

Tokenization imposes a fixed granularity on the input text, freezing how a language model operates on data and how far in the future it predicts. Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) and similar schemes split text once, build a static vocabulary, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Mathurin Videau , Badr Youbi Idrissi , Alessandro Leite , Marc Schoenauer , Olivier Teytaud , David Lopez-Paz