Cited by 221Natural Language Processing TechniquesTopic ModelingSpeech Recognition and Synthesis

How Good is Your Tokenizer? On the Monolingual Performance of Multilingual Language Models

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Rust, Phillip, Pfeiffer, Jonas, Vulić, Ivan, Ruder, Sebastian, Gurevych, Iryna·2021·Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Abstract

Phillip Rust, Jonas Pfeiffer, Ivan Vulić, Sebastian Ruder, Iryna Gurevych. Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2021.

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Crossref · 10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.243

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  • High fertility increases inference cost and compresses effective context windows.

    “increasing inference cost and compressing effective context windows (Rust et al., 2021; Petrov et al., 2024).”

    From Writing-System-Level Tokenizer Adaptation for Byte-Level BPE (2026) · cites this paper as Rust et al., 2021

    Section 4.2 (page not provided) defines high fertility as producing more subwords per word, and Appendix B.1 reports longer tokenized sentences for higher-fertility tokenizers. That supports the basis for fewer words fitting within a fixed token limit, but the paper does not address inference cost or explicitly assess effective context windows. (LLM, conf=0.77)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

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Research works printed but not linked: 11

  1. Erkin Demirtas and Mykola Pechenizkiy. 2013. Cross- lingual polarity detection with machine translation. In Proceedings of the Second International Work- shop on Issues of Sentiment Discovery and Opinion Mining (WISDOM '13), pages 9:1-8, Chicago, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. · DOI
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  5. Joakim Nivre, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Filip Gin- ter, Yoav Goldberg, Jan Hajič, Christopher D. Man- ning, Ryan McDonald, Slav Petrov, Sampo Pyysalo, Natalia Silveira, Reut Tsarfaty, and Daniel Zeman. 2016. Universal Dependencies v1: A multilingual treebank collection. In Proceedings of the Tenth In- ternational Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 1659-1666, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Associa- tion (ELRA).
  6. Debora Nozza, Federico Bianchi, and Dirk Hovy. 2020. What the [MASK]? Making sense of language- specific BERT models. arXiv preprint.
  7. Jonas Pfeiffer, Ivan Vulić, Iryna Gurevych, and Se- bastian Ruder. 2020c. UNKs Everywhere: Adapt- ing Multilingual Language Models to New Scripts. arXiv preprint.
  8. Colin Raffel, Noam Shazeer, Adam Roberts, Kather- ine Lee, Sharan Narang, Michael Matena, Yanqi Zhou, Wei Li, and Peter J. Liu. 2020. Exploring the limits of transfer learning with a unified text-to- text transformer. Journal of Machine Learning Re- search, 21(140):1-67.
  9. Bryan Wilie, Karissa Vincentio, Genta Indra Winata, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Xiaohong Li, Zhi Yuan Lim, Sidik Soleman, Rahmad Mahendra, Pascale Fung, Syafri Bahar, and Ayu Purwarianti. 2020. IndoNLU: Benchmark and resources for evaluating Indonesian natural language understanding. In Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Lan- guage Processing, pages 843-857, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
  10. Yonghui Wu, Mike Schuster, Zhifeng Chen, Quoc V. Le, Mohammad Norouzi, Wolfgang Macherey, Maxim Krikun, Yuan Cao, Qin Gao, Klaus Macherey, Jeff Klingner, Apurva Shah, Melvin John- son, Xiaobing Liu, Lukasz Kaiser, Stephan Gouws, Yoshikiyo Kato, Taku Kudo, Hideto Kazawa, Keith Stevens, George Kurian, Nishant Patil, Wei Wang, Cliff Young, Jason Smith, Jason Riesa, Alex Rud- nick, Oriol Vinyals, Greg Corrado, Macduff Hughes, and Jeffrey Dean. 2016. Google's neural machine translation system: Bridging the gap between human and machine translation. arxiv preprint.
  11. Yian Zhang, Alex Warstadt, Haau-Sing Li, and Samuel R. Bowman. 2020. When do you need bil- lions of words of pretraining data? arXiv preprint.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Rust, P., Pfeiffer, J., Vulić, I., Ruder, S., & Gurevych, I.
Affiliations
  • Technische Universität Darmstadt (DE)
  • University of Cambridge (GB)
Venue
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Published
2021
Pages
3118-3135
OpenAlex
W3120253119
Cited by
202
References
57
Citations by year
2026: 32 · 2025: 32 · 2024: 22 · 2023: 50 · 2022: 35 · 2021: 31
FWCI
15.94
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • TUbilio (Technical University of Darmstadt) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-sa)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
H2020 European Research Council (648909)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech Recognition and Synthesis
Keywords
tokenization, multilingual language models, multilingual tokenization, language model evaluation

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