Yuval Pinter

Senior Academic

Which Pieces Does Unigram Tokenization Really Need?

Sander Land, Yuval Pinter

The Unigram tokenization algorithm offers a probabilistic alternative to the greedy heuristics of Byte-Pair Encoding. Despite its theoretical elegance, its implementation in practice is complex, limiting its adoption to the SentencePiece package and adapters thereof. We bridge this gap between theory and practice by providing a clear guide to implementation and parameter choices. We also identify a simpler algorithm that accepts slightly higher training loss in exchange for improved compression. github.com/sanderland/script_tok

Publication language English
Pages 6351-6360
Publication status Published - 01.01.2026

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Language and Linguistics
Linguistics and Language
Computer Science Applications
Other files and links
Link to publication in Scopus