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Tokenization underlies every large language model, yet it remains an under-theorized and inconsistently designed component. Common subword approaches such as Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) offer scalability but often misalign with linguistic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Sawsan Alqahtani , Mir Tafseer Nayeem , Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar , Tasnim Mohiuddin , M Saiful Bari

Tokenization is the first step in modern neural language model pipelines where an input text is converted to a sequence of subword tokens. We introduce from first principles a finite-state transduction framework which can efficiently encode…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Marco Cognetta , Naoaki Okazaki

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Ehsaneddin Asgari , Yassine El Kheir , Mohammad Ali Sadraei Javaheri

Cross-lingual vocabulary transfer plays a promising role in adapting pre-trained language models to new languages, including low-resource languages. Existing approaches that utilize monolingual or parallel corpora face challenges when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Haruki Sakajo , Yusuke Ide , Justin Vasselli , Yusuke Sakai , Yingtao Tian , Hidetaka Kamigaito , Taro Watanabe

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

State-of-the-art language models are autoregressive and operate on subword units known as tokens. Specifically, one must encode the conditioning string into a list of tokens before passing to the language models for next-token prediction.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Buu Phan , Marton Havasi , Matthew Muckley , Karen Ullrich

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

Tokenization is a crucial step in processing protein sequences for machine learning models, as proteins are complex sequences of amino acids that require meaningful segmentation to capture their functional and structural properties.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-27 Burak Suyunu , Enes Taylan , Arzucan Özgür

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Yifan Hu , Frank Liang , Dachuan Zhao , Jonathan Geuter , Varshini Reddy , Craig W. Schmidt , Chris Tanner

We propose a generalization of neural network sequence models. Instead of predicting one symbol at a time, our multi-scale model makes predictions over multiple, potentially overlapping multi-symbol tokens. A variation of the byte-pair…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-06 Bart van Merriënboer , Amartya Sanyal , Hugo Larochelle , Yoshua Bengio

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

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

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

Tokenization is an important first step in Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipelines because it decides how models learn and represent linguistic information. However, current subword tokenizers like SentencePiece or HuggingFace BPE are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Firoj Ahmmed Patwary , Abdullah Al Noman

The effectiveness of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models largely depends on the vocabulary used at training; small vocabularies can lead to out-of-vocabulary problems -- large ones, to memory issues. Subword (SW) tokenization has been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-02 J. Pourmostafa Roshan Sharami , D. Shterionov , P. Spronck

Tokenization is an understudied and often neglected component of modern LLMs. Most published works use a single tokenizer for all experiments, often borrowed from another model, without performing ablations or analysis to optimize…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Gautier Dagan , Gabriel Synnaeve , Baptiste Rozière

Adapting language models to new data distributions by simple finetuning is challenging. This is due to the rigidity of their subword tokenizers, which typically remain unchanged during adaptation. This inflexibility often leads to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Abraham Toluwase Owodunni , Orevaoghene Ahia , Sachin Kumar

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Yekun Chai , Yewei Fang , Qiwei Peng , Xuhong Li

Subword regularization, used widely in NLP, improves model performance by reducing the dependency on exact tokenizations, augmenting the training corpus, and exposing the model to more unique contexts during training. BPE and MaxMatch, two…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-22 Marco Cognetta , Vilém Zouhar , Naoaki Okazaki

Sequence models for binary analysis are bottlenecked by byte-level tokenization: raw bytes waste precious context window capacity for transformers and other neural network architectures, and many existing text-oriented tokenizers fail on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Michael J. Bommarito