In plain words: Instead of chopping text into pieces with default greedy settings, the study searches for the best word-splitting setup and tests it on generation and classification tasks. It cuts the number of pieces needed and works better than the usual setup, especially for smaller models.
Abstract
Traditional greedy tokenization methods have been a critical step in Natural Language Processing (NLP), influencing how text is converted into tokens and directly impacting model performance. While subword tokenizers like Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) are widely used, questions remain about their optimality across model scales and languages. In this work, we demonstrate through extensive experiments that an optimal BPE configuration significantly reduces token count compared to greedy segmentation, yielding improvements in token-saving percentages and performance benefits, particularly for smaller models. We evaluate tokenization performance across various intrinsic and extrinsic tasks, including generation and classification. Our findings suggest that compression-optimized tokenization strategies could provide substantial advantages for multilingual and low-resource language applications, highlighting a promising direction for further research and inclusive NLP.
Bharath Raj, Garvit Suri, Vikrant Dewangan, Raghav Sonavane
arXiv:2412.06926 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Dec 9, 2024 · updated May 1, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · LoResLM @ COLING 2025. Project page at https://vikr-182.github.io/loreslm/