Related papers: Faster Superword Tokenization

Tokenization is a critical preprocessing step in large language model pipelines, yet widely-used implementations remain CPU-bound and suboptimal for batch inference workflows on GPU. We present BlockBPE, a parallel GPU implementation of…

Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenizers, widely used in Large Language Models, face challenges in multilingual settings, including penalization of non-Western scripts and the creation of tokens with partial UTF-8 sequences. Pretokenization,…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Subword tokenization methods like Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) are widely used in large language models due to their balance of vocabulary compactness and representational power. However, they suffer from inefficiencies in representing rare…

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…

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…

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…

Phones and their context-dependent variants have been the standard modeling units for conventional speech recognition systems, while characters and subwords have demonstrated their effectiveness for end-to-end recognition systems. We…

Unlike hybrid speech recognition systems where the use of tokens was restricted to phones, biphones or triphones the choice of tokens in the end-to-end ASR systems is derived from the text corpus of the training data. The use of…

In language processing, transformers benefit greatly from text being condensed. This is achieved through a larger vocabulary that captures word fragments instead of plain characters. This is often done with Byte Pair Encoding. In the…

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…

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.…

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…