Related papers: BBPE16: UTF-16-based byte-level byte-pair encoding…

This paper investigates the employment of various encoders in text transformation, converting characters into bytes. It discusses local encoders such as ASCII and GB-2312, which encode specific characters into shorter bytes, and universal…

Models that rely on subword tokenization have significant drawbacks, such as sensitivity to character-level noise like spelling errors and inconsistent compression rates across different languages and scripts. While character- or byte-level…

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 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…

Confidence estimation, in which we estimate the reliability of each recognized token (e.g., word, sub-word, and character) in automatic speech recognition (ASR) hypotheses and detect incorrectly recognized tokens, is an important function…

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) mostly use BPE (Byte Pair Encoding) based tokenizers, which are very effective for simple structured Latin scripts such as English. However, standard BPE tokenizers struggle to process complex Abugida…

The performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) models can be greatly improved by proper beam-search decoding with external language model (LM). There has been an increasing interest in Korean speech recognition, but not many studies…

We present automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for Tamil and Kannada based on subword modeling to effectively handle unlimited vocabulary due to the highly agglutinative nature of the languages. We explore byte pair encoding (BPE),…

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…

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…

Subword tokenization is a common method for vocabulary building in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models. However, increasingly complex tasks have revealed its disadvantages. First, a vocabulary cannot be modified once it is learned,…

Subword tokenization critically affects Natural Language Processing (NLP) performance, yet its behavior in morphologically rich and low-resource language families remains under-explored. This study systematically compares three subword…

Training a conventional automatic speech recognition (ASR) system to support multiple languages is challenging because the sub-word unit, lexicon and word inventories are typically language specific. In contrast, sequence-to-sequence models…

Training speech recognizers with unpaired speech and text -- known as unsupervised speech recognition (UASR) -- is a crucial step toward extending ASR to low-resource languages in the long-tail distribution and enabling multimodal learning…

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…

As large language models move toward million-token context windows, CPU tokenizers become a major slowdown because they process text one step at a time while powerful GPUs sit unused. We built a GPU-based byte-level BPE tokenizer that…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are typically optimized for verbatim transcription, which preserves disfluencies, filler words, and informal spoken structures that are often unsuitable for downstream writing-oriented…

We present the OC16-CE80 Chinese-English mixlingual speech database which was released as a main resource for training, development and test for the Chinese-English mixlingual speech recognition (MixASR-CHEN) challenge on O-COCOSDA 2016.…

Currently, many studies view DNA sequences as a special type of language and utilize Transformers to model them. These studies use fixed-length k-mer segmentation and BPE subword tokenization but lack a systematic evaluation to determine…

We present UTF8Tokenizer, a minimalist byte-level tokenizer that maps text exactly to IDs corresponding to the bytes underlying the text's UTF-8 encoding (e.g., byte x09 is token ID 9). Unlike prior byte-level approaches (Xue et al., 2021;…