← 研踪 PaperTrailACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.342 · 记录 #1
Parity-Aware Byte-Pair Encoding: Improving Cross-lingual Fairness in Tokenization
来源日期（仅到月份） 2026-07
来源记录日期 2026-07
雷达观测 2026-11-01 22:04
摘要
Tokenization is the first—and often least scrutinized—step of most NLP pipelines. Standard algorithms for learning tokenizers rely on frequency-based objectives, which favor languages dominant in the training data and consequently leave lower-resource languages with tokenizations that are disproportionately longer, morphologically implausible, or even riddled with placeholders. This phenomenon ultimately amplifies computational and financial inequalities between users from different language backgrounds. To remedy this, we introduce Parity-aware Byte Pair Encoding (BPE), a variant of the widely-used BPE algorithm. At every merge step, Parity-aware BPE applies a fair-max rule that maximizes the compression gain of the currently worst-compressed language, trading a small amount of global compression for cross-lingual parity. We find empirically that Parity-aware BPE reduces tokenization inequality—operationalized by the Gini coefficient of per-language token costs—by up to 89% relative to Classical BPE. This comes with negligible impact on global compression rate and no evidence of systematic degradation in downstream LM performance.
论文发现出处
这些页面提供论文线索，不代表同行评审或质量认证。
观测到的版本
平台记录号代表本站观测到的元数据变化，不是作者修订号。来源日期仅到月份或年份时，按该月或该年首日存档。
记录 #1 · 2026-07 · 最新观测版本
Parity-Aware Byte-Pair Encoding: Improving Cross-lingual Fairness in Tokenization
Tokenization is the first—and often least scrutinized—step of most NLP pipelines. Standard algorithms for learning tokenizers rely on frequency-based objectives, which favor languages dominant in the training data and consequently leave lower-resource languages with tokenizations that are disproportionately longer, morphologically implausible, or even riddled with placeholders. This phenomenon ultimately amplifies computational and financial inequalities between users from different language backgrounds. To remedy this, we introduce Parity-aware Byte Pair Encoding (BPE), a variant of the widely-used BPE algorithm. At every merge step, Parity-aware BPE applies a fair-max rule that maximizes the compression gain of the currently worst-compressed language, trading a small amount of global compression for cross-lingual parity. We find empirically that Parity-aware BPE reduces tokenization inequality—operationalized by the Gini coefficient of per-language token costs—by up to 89% relative to Classical BPE. This comes with negligible impact on global compression rate and no evidence of systematic degradation in downstream LM performance.
查看此版本解读 →查看此版本原文 ↗