Related papers: Tokenisation over Bounded Alphabets is Hard
In this work, we prove the NP-completeness of two variants of tokenisation, defined as the problem of compressing a dataset to at most $\delta$ symbols by either finding a vocabulary directly (direct tokenisation), or selecting a sequence…
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…
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)…
Subword tokenization methods, such as Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE), significantly impact the performance and efficiency of large language models (LLMs). The standard approach involves training a general-purpose tokenizer that uniformly…
Tokenization is an important preprocessing step in the training and inference of large language models (LLMs). While there has been extensive research on the expressive power of the neural achitectures used in LLMs, the impact of…
Tokenization is fundamental in assembly code analysis, impacting intrinsic characteristics like vocabulary size, semantic coverage, and extrinsic performance in downstream tasks. Despite its significance, tokenization in the context of…
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…
Tokenization is a foundational step in natural language processing (NLP) tasks, bridging raw text and language models. Existing tokenization approaches like Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) originate from the field of data compression, and it has…
Language models typically tokenize raw text into sequences of subword identifiers from a predefined vocabulary, a process inherently sensitive to typographical errors, length variations, and largely oblivious to the internal structure of…
Tokenization is a hardcoded compression step which remains in the training pipeline of Large Language Models (LLMs), despite a general trend towards architectures becoming increasingly end-to-end. Prior work has shown promising results at…
Tokenization is the process of encoding strings into tokens of a fixed vocabulary size, and is widely utilized in Natural Language Processing applications. The leading tokenization algorithm today is Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE), which…
We consider decision problems for deterministic pushdown automata over a unary alphabet (udpda, for short). Udpda are a simple computation model that accept exactly the unary regular languages, but can be exponentially more succinct than…
The problem of matching a query string to a directed graph, whose vertices are labeled by strings, has application in different fields, from data mining to computational biology. Several variants of the problem have been considered,…
Tokenization - the practice of converting strings of characters from an alphabet into sequences of tokens over a vocabulary - is a critical step in the NLP pipeline. The use of token representations is widely credited with increased model…
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 is fundamental to Natural Language Processing (NLP), directly impacting model efficiency and linguistic fidelity. While Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) is widely used in Large Language Models (LLMs), it often disregards morpheme…
Subword tokenization has become the de-facto standard for tokenization, although comparative evaluations of subword vocabulary quality across languages are scarce. Existing evaluation studies focus on the effect of a tokenization algorithm…
The Byte Pair Encoding algorithm can be safely batched to merge hundreds of pairs of tokens at a time when building up a tokenizer's vocabulary. This technique combined with reducing the memory footprint of text used in vocabulary training…
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…
Language models typically tokenize text into subwords, using a deterministic, hand-engineered heuristic of combining characters into longer surface-level strings such as 'ing' or whole words. Recent literature has repeatedly shown the…