Papers › Joint Optimization of Tokenization and Downstream Model

Joint Optimization of Tokenization and Downstream Model

26 May 2021Findings (ACL) 2021 8arXiv:2105.12410archive 2025-07-28

Tatsuya Hiraoka, Sho Takase, Kei Uchiumi, Atsushi Keyaki, Naoaki Okazaki

Since traditional tokenizers are isolated from a downstream task and model, they cannot output an appropriate tokenization depending on the task and model, although recent studies imply that the appropriate tokenization improves the performance. In this paper, we propose a novel method to find an appropriate tokenization to a given downstream model by jointly optimizing a tokenizer and the model. The proposed method has no restriction except for using loss values computed by the downstream model to train the tokenizer, and thus, we can apply the proposed method to any NLP task. Moreover, the proposed method can be used to explore the appropriate tokenization for an already trained model as post-processing. Therefore, the proposed method is applicable to various situations. We evaluated whether our method contributes to improving performance on text classification in three languages and machine translation in eight language pairs. Experimental results show that our proposed method improves the performance by determining appropriate tokenizations.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

tatHi/optok officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
tatHi/optok4at officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Machine TranslationText ClassificationTranslationmodeltext-classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections