Papers › Greed is All You Need: An Evaluation of Tokenizer Inference Methods

Greed is All You Need: An Evaluation of Tokenizer Inference Methods

2 Mar 2024arXiv:2403.01289archive 2025-07-28

Omri Uzan, Craig W. Schmidt, Chris Tanner, Yuval Pinter

While subword tokenizers such as BPE and WordPiece are typically used to build vocabularies for NLP models, the method of decoding text into a sequence of tokens from these vocabularies is often left unspecified, or ill-suited to the method in which they were constructed. We provide a controlled analysis of seven tokenizer inference methods across four different algorithms and three vocabulary sizes, performed on a novel intrinsic evaluation suite we curated for English, combining measures rooted in morphology, cognition, and information theory. We show that for the most commonly used tokenizers, greedy inference performs surprisingly well; and that SaGe, a recently-introduced contextually-informed tokenizer, outperforms all others on morphological alignment.

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