| Challenge: | Subword tokenization schemes such as Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) are widely adopted, but their effectiveness in multilingual settings remains understudied. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual tokenizer that produces linguistically coherent tokens for multilingual LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tokenizer improves fertility score by 39.5% over LLaMA4 and 18% over Sutra. |
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Diana Abagyan, Alejandro R. Salamanca, Andres Felipe Cruz-Salinas, Kris Cao, Hangyu Lin, Acyr Locatelli, Marzieh Fadaee, Ahmet Üstün, Sara Hooker
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Tokenizer Choice For LLM Training: Negligible or Crucial? (2024.findings-naacl)
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Mehdi Ali, Michael Fromm, Klaudia Thellmann, Richard Rutmann, Max Lübbering, Johannes Leveling, Katrin Klug, Jan Ebert, Niclas Doll, Jasper Buschhoff, Charvi Jain, Alexander Weber, Lena Jurkschat, Hammam Abdelwahab, Chelsea John, Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Malte Ostendorff, Samuel Weinbach, Rafet Sifa, Stefan Kesselheim, Nicolas Flores-Herr
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Accelerating Multilingual Language Model for Excessively Tokenized Languages (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown a significant degree of multilingual proficiency on a variety of tasks in multiple languages. |
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| Challenge: | Subword tokenization methods impact performance and efficiency of large language models . generic tokens can incur inefficiencies when applying the model to specific domains or languages . |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to train and inference tokenizers rely on heuristics or large-scale searches to determine optimal data mixtures. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been primarily focused on English, leaving the multilingual ability unexplored. |
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Tokenization Falling Short: On Subword Robustness in Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Language models typically tokenize raw text into sequences of subword identifiers from a predefined vocabulary. |
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Improving Consistency in LLM Inference using Probabilistic Tokenization (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Prior work has shown that probabilistic tokenizations can generate multiple tokenization of the same input string. |
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