Daily Papers

Current speech language models exceed the size and latency constraints of many deployment environments. We build compact, expressive speech generation models through layer-aligned distillation, matching hidden states, attention maps, and softened logits to compress large multimodal transformers by 3x with minimal loss in performance. We introduce TinyWave, a family of 2B-parameter models for speech-to-speech and interleaved speech-text generation, trained on 50,000 hours of public audio. TinyWave supports (i) speech-only generation using phonetic or expressive tokens and (ii) mixed speech-text continuations. Evaluation on Libri-Light shows TinyWave within 1.4 normalized perplexity points of its teacher. Accuracy on spoken StoryCloze and SALMon reaches 93-97% of the teacher's performance, outperforming size-matched baselines. These models are optimized for deployment on commodity hardware, enabling applications in real-time conversational agents, assistive technologies, and low-resource environments. We release models, training code, and evaluation scripts to support reproducible research on compact, expressive speech generation.

When used with deep learning, the symbolic music modality is often coupled with language model architectures. To do so, the music needs to be tokenized, i.e. converted into a sequence of discrete tokens. This can be achieved by different approaches, as music can be composed of simultaneous tracks, of simultaneous notes with several attributes. Until now, the proposed tokenizations rely on small vocabularies of tokens describing the note attributes and time events, resulting in fairly long token sequences, and a sub-optimal use of the embedding space of language models. Recent research has put efforts on reducing the overall sequence length by merging embeddings or combining tokens. In this paper, we show that Byte Pair Encoding, a compression technique widely used for natural language, significantly decreases the sequence length while increasing the vocabulary size. By doing so, we leverage the embedding capabilities of such models with more expressive tokens, resulting in both better results and faster inference in generation and classification tasks. The source code is shared on Github, along with a companion website. Finally, BPE is directly implemented in MidiTok, allowing the reader to easily benefit from this method.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) are the dominant models for generative tasks in language, they do not perform as well as diffusion models on image and video generation. To effectively use LLMs for visual generation, one crucial component is the visual tokenizer that maps pixel-space inputs to discrete tokens appropriate for LLM learning. In this paper, we introduce MAGVIT-v2, a video tokenizer designed to generate concise and expressive tokens for both videos and images using a common token vocabulary. Equipped with this new tokenizer, we show that LLMs outperform diffusion models on standard image and video generation benchmarks including ImageNet and Kinetics. In addition, we demonstrate that our tokenizer surpasses the previously top-performing video tokenizer on two more tasks: (1) video compression comparable to the next-generation video codec (VCC) according to human evaluations, and (2) learning effective representations for action recognition tasks.

Humans organize knowledge into compact categories through semantic compression by mapping diverse instances to abstract representations while preserving meaning (e.g., robin and blue jay are both birds; most birds can fly). These concepts reflect a trade-off between expressive fidelity and representational simplicity. Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable linguistic abilities, yet whether their internal representations strike a human-like trade-off between compression and semantic fidelity is unclear. We introduce a novel information-theoretic framework, drawing from Rate-Distortion Theory and the Information Bottleneck principle, to quantitatively compare these strategies. Analyzing token embeddings from a diverse suite of LLMs against seminal human categorization benchmarks, we uncover key divergences. While LLMs form broad conceptual categories that align with human judgment, they struggle to capture the fine-grained semantic distinctions crucial for human understanding. More fundamentally, LLMs demonstrate a strong bias towards aggressive statistical compression, whereas human conceptual systems appear to prioritize adaptive nuance and contextual richness, even if this results in lower compressional efficiency by our measures. These findings illuminate critical differences between current AI and human cognitive architectures, guiding pathways toward LLMs with more human-aligned conceptual representations.

Recent theoretical work has identified surprisingly simple reasoning problems, such as checking if two nodes in a graph are connected or simulating finite-state machines, that are provably unsolvable by standard transformers that answer immediately after reading their input. However, in practice, transformers' reasoning can be improved by allowing them to use a "chain of thought" or "scratchpad", i.e., generate and condition on a sequence of intermediate tokens before answering. Motivated by this, we ask: Does such intermediate generation fundamentally extend the computational power of a decoder-only transformer? We show that the answer is yes, but the amount of increase depends crucially on the amount of intermediate generation. For instance, we find that transformer decoders with a logarithmic number of decoding steps (w.r.t. the input length) push the limits of standard transformers only slightly, while a linear number of decoding steps, assuming a slight generalization to standard pre-norm, adds a clear new ability (under standard complexity conjectures): recognizing all regular languages. Our results also imply that linear steps keep transformer decoders within context-sensitive languages, and polynomial steps with generalized pre-norm make them recognize exactly the class of polynomial-time solvable problems -- the first exact characterization of a type of transformers in terms of standard complexity classes. Together, our results provide a nuanced framework for understanding how the length of a transformer's chain of thought or scratchpad impacts its reasoning power.

Efficient long-context language modeling remains a significant challenge in Natural Language Processing (NLP). While Transformers dominate language tasks, they struggle with long sequences due to quadratic computational complexity in training and linearly scaling memory costs during inference. Recent State Space Models (SSMs) such as Mamba offer alternatives with constant memory usage, but they underperform in tasks requiring extensive in-context retrieval. We introduce Taipan, a novel hybrid architecture that combines Mamba-2 with Selective Attention Layers (SALs). These SALs identify tokens requiring long-range interactions, remove less important features, and then augment their representations using the attention module. This approach balances Mamba's efficiency with Transformer-like performance in memory-intensive tasks. By constraining the attention budget, Taipan extends accurate predictions to context lengths of up to 1 million tokens while preserving computational efficiency. Our experiments demonstrate Taipan's superior performance across various scales and tasks, offering a promising solution for efficient long-context language modeling.

Language models typically tokenize text into subwords, using a deterministic, hand-engineered heuristic of combining characters into longer surface-level strings such as 'ing' or whole words. Recent literature has repeatedly shown the limitations of such a tokenization strategy, particularly for documents not written in English and for representing numbers. On the other extreme, byte/character-level language models are much less restricted but suffer from increased sequence description lengths and a subsequent quadratic expansion in self-attention computation. Recent attempts to compress and limit these context lengths with fixed size convolutions is helpful but completely ignores the word boundary. This paper considers an alternative 'learn your tokens' scheme which utilizes the word boundary to pool bytes/characters into word representations, which are fed to the primary language model, before again decoding individual characters/bytes per word in parallel. We find that our moderately expressive and moderately fast end-to-end tokenizer outperform by over 300% both subwords and byte/character models over the intrinsic language modeling metric of next-word prediction across datasets. It particularly outshines on rare words, outperforming by a factor of 30! We extensively study the language modeling setup for all three categories of tokenizers and theoretically analyze how our end-to-end models can also be a strong trade-off in efficiency and robustness.

We propose a novel attention mechanism, named Cog Attention, that enables attention weights to be negative for enhanced expressiveness, which stems from two key factors: (1) Cog Attention can shift the token deletion and copying function from a static OV matrix to dynamic QK inner products, with the OV matrix now focusing more on refinement or modification. The attention head can simultaneously delete, copy, or retain tokens by assigning them negative, positive, or minimal attention weights, respectively. As a result, a single attention head becomes more flexible and expressive. (2) Cog Attention improves the model's robustness against representational collapse, which can occur when earlier tokens are over-squashed into later positions, leading to homogeneous representations. Negative weights reduce effective information paths from earlier to later tokens, helping to mitigate this issue. We develop Transformer-like models which use Cog Attention as attention modules, including decoder-only models for language modeling and U-ViT diffusion models for image generation. Experiments show that models using Cog Attention exhibit superior performance compared to those employing traditional softmax attention modules. Our approach suggests a promising research direction for rethinking and breaking the entrenched constraints of traditional softmax attention, such as the requirement for non-negative weights.

Expressive human pose and shape estimation (a.k.a. 3D whole-body mesh recovery) involves the human body, hand, and expression estimation. Most existing methods have tackled this task in a two-stage manner, first detecting the human body part with an off-the-shelf detection model and inferring the different human body parts individually. Despite the impressive results achieved, these methods suffer from 1) loss of valuable contextual information via cropping, 2) introducing distractions, and 3) lacking inter-association among different persons and body parts, inevitably causing performance degradation, especially for crowded scenes. To address these issues, we introduce a novel all-in-one-stage framework, AiOS, for multiple expressive human pose and shape recovery without an additional human detection step. Specifically, our method is built upon DETR, which treats multi-person whole-body mesh recovery task as a progressive set prediction problem with various sequential detection. We devise the decoder tokens and extend them to our task. Specifically, we first employ a human token to probe a human location in the image and encode global features for each instance, which provides a coarse location for the later transformer block. Then, we introduce a joint-related token to probe the human joint in the image and encoder a fine-grained local feature, which collaborates with the global feature to regress the whole-body mesh. This straightforward but effective model outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by a 9% reduction in NMVE on AGORA, a 30% reduction in PVE on EHF, a 10% reduction in PVE on ARCTIC, and a 3% reduction in PVE on EgoBody.

We present X-Dancer, a novel zero-shot music-driven image animation pipeline that creates diverse and long-range lifelike human dance videos from a single static image. As its core, we introduce a unified transformer-diffusion framework, featuring an autoregressive transformer model that synthesize extended and music-synchronized token sequences for 2D body, head and hands poses, which then guide a diffusion model to produce coherent and realistic dance video frames. Unlike traditional methods that primarily generate human motion in 3D, X-Dancer addresses data limitations and enhances scalability by modeling a wide spectrum of 2D dance motions, capturing their nuanced alignment with musical beats through readily available monocular videos. To achieve this, we first build a spatially compositional token representation from 2D human pose labels associated with keypoint confidences, encoding both large articulated body movements (e.g., upper and lower body) and fine-grained motions (e.g., head and hands). We then design a music-to-motion transformer model that autoregressively generates music-aligned dance pose token sequences, incorporating global attention to both musical style and prior motion context. Finally we leverage a diffusion backbone to animate the reference image with these synthesized pose tokens through AdaIN, forming a fully differentiable end-to-end framework. Experimental results demonstrate that X-Dancer is able to produce both diverse and characterized dance videos, substantially outperforming state-of-the-art methods in term of diversity, expressiveness and realism. Code and model will be available for research purposes.

Recent advances in text-to-image diffusion models have enabled the generation of diverse and high-quality images. However, generated images often fall short of depicting subtle details and are susceptible to errors due to ambiguity in the input text. One way of alleviating these issues is to train diffusion models on class-labeled datasets. This comes with a downside, doing so limits their expressive power: (i) supervised datasets are generally small compared to large-scale scraped text-image datasets on which text-to-image models are trained, and so the quality and diversity of generated images are severely affected, or (ii) the input is a hard-coded label, as opposed to free-form text, which limits the control over the generated images. In this work, we propose a non-invasive fine-tuning technique that capitalizes on the expressive potential of free-form text while achieving high accuracy through discriminative signals from a pretrained classifier, which guides the generation. This is done by iteratively modifying the embedding of a single input token of a text-to-image diffusion model, using the classifier, by steering generated images toward a given target class. Our method is fast compared to prior fine-tuning methods and does not require a collection of in-class images or retraining of a noise-tolerant classifier. We evaluate our method extensively, showing that the generated images are: (i) more accurate and of higher quality than standard diffusion models, (ii) can be used to augment training data in a low-resource setting, and (iii) reveal information about the data used to train the guiding classifier. The code is available at https://github.com/idansc/discriminative_class_tokens

Voice cloning is the task of learning to synthesize the voice of an unseen speaker from a few samples. While current voice cloning methods achieve promising results in Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis for a new voice, these approaches lack the ability to control the expressiveness of synthesized audio. In this work, we propose a controllable voice cloning method that allows fine-grained control over various style aspects of the synthesized speech for an unseen speaker. We achieve this by explicitly conditioning the speech synthesis model on a speaker encoding, pitch contour and latent style tokens during training. Through both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we show that our framework can be used for various expressive voice cloning tasks using only a few transcribed or untranscribed speech samples for a new speaker. These cloning tasks include style transfer from a reference speech, synthesizing speech directly from text, and fine-grained style control by manipulating the style conditioning variables during inference.

Self-attention performs well in long context but has quadratic complexity. Existing RNN layers have linear complexity, but their performance in long context is limited by the expressive power of their hidden state. We propose a new class of sequence modeling layers with linear complexity and an expressive hidden state. The key idea is to make the hidden state a machine learning model itself, and the update rule a step of self-supervised learning. Since the hidden state is updated by training even on test sequences, our layers are called Test-Time Training (TTT) layers. We consider two instantiations: TTT-Linear and TTT-MLP, whose hidden state is a linear model and a two-layer MLP respectively. We evaluate our instantiations at the scale of 125M to 1.3B parameters, comparing with a strong Transformer and Mamba, a modern RNN. Both TTT-Linear and TTT-MLP match or exceed the baselines. Similar to Transformer, they can keep reducing perplexity by conditioning on more tokens, while Mamba cannot after 16k context. With preliminary systems optimization, TTT-Linear is already faster than Transformer at 8k context and matches Mamba in wall-clock time. TTT-MLP still faces challenges in memory I/O, but shows larger potential in long context, pointing to a promising direction for future research.

Recent AIGC systems possess the capability to generate digital multimedia content based on human language instructions, such as text, image and video. However, when it comes to speech, existing methods related to human instruction-to-speech generation exhibit two limitations. Firstly, they require the division of inputs into content prompt (transcript) and description prompt (style and speaker), instead of directly supporting human instruction. This division is less natural in form and does not align with other AIGC models. Secondly, the practice of utilizing an independent description prompt to model speech style, without considering the transcript content, restricts the ability to control speech at a fine-grained level. To address these limitations, we propose VoxInstruct, a novel unified multilingual codec language modeling framework that extends traditional text-to-speech tasks into a general human instruction-to-speech task. Our approach enhances the expressiveness of human instruction-guided speech generation and aligns the speech generation paradigm with other modalities. To enable the model to automatically extract the content of synthesized speech from raw text instructions, we introduce speech semantic tokens as an intermediate representation for instruction-to-content guidance. We also incorporate multiple Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) strategies into our codec language model, which strengthens the generated speech following human instructions. Furthermore, our model architecture and training strategies allow for the simultaneous support of combining speech prompt and descriptive human instruction for expressive speech synthesis, which is a first-of-its-kind attempt. Codes, models and demos are at: https://github.com/thuhcsi/VoxInstruct.

We present X-Actor, a novel audio-driven portrait animation framework that generates lifelike, emotionally expressive talking head videos from a single reference image and an input audio clip. Unlike prior methods that emphasize lip synchronization and short-range visual fidelity in constrained speaking scenarios, X-Actor enables actor-quality, long-form portrait performance capturing nuanced, dynamically evolving emotions that flow coherently with the rhythm and content of speech. Central to our approach is a two-stage decoupled generation pipeline: an audio-conditioned autoregressive diffusion model that predicts expressive yet identity-agnostic facial motion latent tokens within a long temporal context window, followed by a diffusion-based video synthesis module that translates these motions into high-fidelity video animations. By operating in a compact facial motion latent space decoupled from visual and identity cues, our autoregressive diffusion model effectively captures long-range correlations between audio and facial dynamics through a diffusion-forcing training paradigm, enabling infinite-length emotionally-rich motion prediction without error accumulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that X-Actor produces compelling, cinematic-style performances that go beyond standard talking head animations and achieves state-of-the-art results in long-range, audio-driven emotional portrait acting.

We present RWKV-7 "Goose", a new sequence modeling architecture, along with pre-trained language models that establish a new state-of-the-art in downstream performance at the 3 billion parameter scale on multilingual tasks, and match current SoTA English language performance despite being trained on dramatically fewer tokens than other top 3B models. Nevertheless, RWKV-7 models require only constant memory usage and constant inference time per token. RWKV-7 introduces a newly generalized formulation of the delta rule with vector-valued gating and in-context learning rates, as well as a relaxed value replacement rule. We show that RWKV-7 can perform state tracking and recognize all regular languages, while retaining parallelizability of training. This exceeds the capabilities of Transformers under standard complexity conjectures, which are limited to TC^0. To demonstrate RWKV-7's language modeling capability, we also present an extended open source 3.1 trillion token multilingual corpus, and train four RWKV-7 models ranging from 0.19 billion to 2.9 billion parameters on this dataset. To foster openness, reproduction, and adoption, we release our models and dataset component listing at https://huggingface.co/RWKV, and our training and inference code at https://github.com/RWKV/RWKV-LM all under the Apache 2.0 License.

Text-to-motion generation has experienced remarkable progress in recent years. However, current approaches remain limited to synthesizing motion from short or general text prompts, primarily due to dataset constraints. This limitation undermines fine-grained controllability and generalization to unseen prompts. In this paper, we introduce SnapMoGen, a new text-motion dataset featuring high-quality motion capture data paired with accurate, expressive textual annotations. The dataset comprises 20K motion clips totaling 44 hours, accompanied by 122K detailed textual descriptions averaging 48 words per description (vs. 12 words of HumanML3D). Importantly, these motion clips preserve original temporal continuity as they were in long sequences, facilitating research in long-term motion generation and blending. We also improve upon previous generative masked modeling approaches. Our model, MoMask++, transforms motion into multi-scale token sequences that better exploit the token capacity, and learns to generate all tokens using a single generative masked transformer. MoMask++ achieves state-of-the-art performance on both HumanML3D and SnapMoGen benchmarks. Additionally, we demonstrate the ability to process casual user prompts by employing an LLM to reformat inputs to align with the expressivity and narration style of SnapMoGen. Project webpage: https://snap-research.github.io/SnapMoGen/

We present X-UniMotion, a unified and expressive implicit latent representation for whole-body human motion, encompassing facial expressions, body poses, and hand gestures. Unlike prior motion transfer methods that rely on explicit skeletal poses and heuristic cross-identity adjustments, our approach encodes multi-granular motion directly from a single image into a compact set of four disentangled latent tokens -- one for facial expression, one for body pose, and one for each hand. These motion latents are both highly expressive and identity-agnostic, enabling high-fidelity, detailed cross-identity motion transfer across subjects with diverse identities, poses, and spatial configurations. To achieve this, we introduce a self-supervised, end-to-end framework that jointly learns the motion encoder and latent representation alongside a DiT-based video generative model, trained on large-scale, diverse human motion datasets. Motion-identity disentanglement is enforced via 2D spatial and color augmentations, as well as synthetic 3D renderings of cross-identity subject pairs under shared poses. Furthermore, we guide motion token learning with auxiliary decoders that promote fine-grained, semantically aligned, and depth-aware motion embeddings. Extensive experiments show that X-UniMotion outperforms state-of-the-art methods, producing highly expressive animations with superior motion fidelity and identity preservation.

Transformer models typically calculate attention matrices using dot products, which have limitations when capturing nonlinear relationships between embedding vectors. We propose Neural Attention, a technique that replaces dot products with feed-forward networks, enabling a more expressive representation of relationships between tokens. This approach modifies only the attention matrix calculation while preserving the matrix dimensions, making it easily adaptable to existing transformer-based architectures. We provide a detailed mathematical justification for why Neural Attention increases representational capacity and conduct controlled experiments to validate this claim. When comparing Neural Attention and Dot-Product Attention, NLP experiments on WikiText-103 show a reduction in perplexity of over 5 percent. Similarly, experiments on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 show comparable improvements for image classification tasks. While Neural Attention introduces higher computational demands, we develop techniques to mitigate these challenges, ensuring practical usability without sacrificing the increased expressivity it provides. This work establishes Neural Attention as an effective means of enhancing the predictive capabilities of transformer models across a variety of applications.

Movie story analysis requires understanding characters' emotions and mental states. Towards this goal, we formulate emotion understanding as predicting a diverse and multi-label set of emotions at the level of a movie scene and for each character. We propose EmoTx, a multimodal Transformer-based architecture that ingests videos, multiple characters, and dialog utterances to make joint predictions. By leveraging annotations from the MovieGraphs dataset, we aim to predict classic emotions (e.g. happy, angry) and other mental states (e.g. honest, helpful). We conduct experiments on the most frequently occurring 10 and 25 labels, and a mapping that clusters 181 labels to 26. Ablation studies and comparison against adapted state-of-the-art emotion recognition approaches shows the effectiveness of EmoTx. Analyzing EmoTx's self-attention scores reveals that expressive emotions often look at character tokens while other mental states rely on video and dialog cues.

Human image animation has gained increasing attention and developed rapidly due to its broad applications in digital humans. However, existing methods rely largely on 2D-rendered pose images for motion guidance, which limits generalization and discards essential 3D information for open-world animation. To tackle this problem, we propose MTVCrafter (Motion Tokenization Video Crafter), the first framework that directly models raw 3D motion sequences (i.e., 4D motion) for human image animation. Specifically, we introduce 4DMoT (4D motion tokenizer) to quantize 3D motion sequences into 4D motion tokens. Compared to 2D-rendered pose images, 4D motion tokens offer more robust spatio-temporal cues and avoid strict pixel-level alignment between pose image and character, enabling more flexible and disentangled control. Then, we introduce MV-DiT (Motion-aware Video DiT). By designing unique motion attention with 4D positional encodings, MV-DiT can effectively leverage motion tokens as 4D compact yet expressive context for human image animation in the complex 3D world. Hence, it marks a significant step forward in this field and opens a new direction for pose-guided human video generation. Experiments show that our MTVCrafter achieves state-of-the-art results with an FID-VID of 6.98, surpassing the second-best by 65%. Powered by robust motion tokens, MTVCrafter also generalizes well to diverse open-world characters (single/multiple, full/half-body) across various styles and scenarios. Our video demos and code are on: https://github.com/DINGYANB/MTVCrafter.

Current language models generate chain-of-thought traces by autoregressively sampling tokens from a finite vocabulary. While this discrete sampling has achieved remarkable success, conducting chain-of-thought with continuously-valued tokens (CoT2) offers a richer and more expressive alternative. Our work examines the benefits of CoT2 through logical reasoning tasks that inherently require search capabilities and provide optimization and exploration methods for CoT2. Theoretically, we show that CoT2 allows the model to track multiple traces in parallel and quantify its benefits for inference efficiency. Notably, one layer transformer equipped with CoT2 can provably solve the combinatorial "subset sum problem" given sufficient embedding dimension. These insights lead to a novel and effective supervision strategy where we match the softmax outputs to the empirical token distributions of a set of target traces. Complementing this, we introduce sampling strategies that unlock policy optimization and self-improvement for CoT2. Our first strategy samples and composes K discrete tokens at each decoding step to control the level of parallelism, and reduces to standard CoT when K=1. Our second strategy relies on continuous exploration over the probability simplex. Experiments confirm that policy optimization with CoT2 indeed improves the performance of the model beyond its initial discrete or continuous supervision.

Providing external knowledge to Large Language Models (LLMs) is a key point for using these models in real-world applications for several reasons, such as incorporating up-to-date content in a real-time manner, providing access to domain-specific knowledge, and contributing to hallucination prevention. The vector database-based Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach has been widely adopted to this end. Thus, any part of external knowledge can be retrieved and provided to some LLM as the input context. Despite RAG approach's success, it still might be unfeasible for some applications, because the context retrieved can demand a longer context window than the size supported by LLM. Even when the context retrieved fits into the context window size, the number of tokens might be expressive and, consequently, impact costs and processing time, becoming impractical for most applications. To address these, we propose CRAG, a novel approach able to effectively reduce the number of prompting tokens without degrading the quality of the response generated compared to a solution using RAG. Through our experiments, we show that CRAG can reduce the number of tokens by at least 46\%, achieving more than 90\% in some cases, compared to RAG. Moreover, the number of tokens with CRAG does not increase considerably when the number of reviews analyzed is higher, unlike RAG, where the number of tokens is almost 9x higher when there are 75 reviews compared to 4 reviews.

Most existing vision encoders map images into a fixed-length sequence of tokens, overlooking the fact that different images contain varying amounts of information. For example, a visually complex image (e.g., a cluttered room) inherently carries more information and thus deserves more tokens than a simple image (e.g., a blank wall). To address this inefficiency, we propose DOVE, a dynamic vision encoder that produces a variable number of visual tokens (i.e., continuous representation vectors) to reconstruct each image. Our results show that DOVE significantly reduces the average number of tokens while maintaining high reconstruction quality. In several linear probing and downstream multimodal tasks, it outperforms existing autoencoder-based tokenization methods when using far fewer tokens, capturing more expressive semantic features compared to fixed-length encoding. We further extend DOVE with query-conditioned tokenization. By guiding the model to focus on query-relevant regions, it achieves more efficient and targeted semantic extraction. Our code and checkpoints are available at https://dove-encoder.github.io/dove-encoder.

Human cognition naturally engages with abstract and fluid concepts, whereas existing reasoning models often rely on generating discrete tokens, potentially constraining their expressive capabilities. Recent advancements aim to address this limitation by enabling large language models (LLMs) to generate soft, abstract tokens, thus facilitating reasoning within a continuous concept space. This paper explores the `Soft Thinking' capabilities of various LLMs by examining the models' internal behavior using a suite of probing techniques. Contrary to the common belief that Soft Thinking enables the simultaneous exploration of diverse reasoning paths, our findings reveal that LLMs predominantly rely on the most influential component of the soft inputs during subsequent decoding steps. This reliance hinders the exploration of different reasoning paths and reduces vanilla Soft Thinking to a form of greedy decoding, obscuring the advantage of transmitting more information through Soft Tokens. To tackle this issue, we explore sampling strategies to introduce randomness, employing methods such as Dirichlet resampling and the Gumbel-Softmax trick. Our experiments demonstrate that incorporating randomness can alleviate the limitations of vanilla approaches and unleash the potential of Soft Thinking. Notably, the Gumbel-Softmax trick provides adequate randomness with controlled smoothness, resulting in superior performance across eight reasoning benchmarks.

While acoustic expressiveness has long been studied in expressive text-to-speech (ETTS), the inherent expressiveness in text lacks sufficient attention, especially for ETTS of artistic works. In this paper, we introduce StoryTTS, a highly ETTS dataset that contains rich expressiveness both in acoustic and textual perspective, from the recording of a Mandarin storytelling show. A systematic and comprehensive labeling framework is proposed for textual expressiveness. We analyze and define speech-related textual expressiveness in StoryTTS to include five distinct dimensions through linguistics, rhetoric, etc. Then we employ large language models and prompt them with a few manual annotation examples for batch annotation. The resulting corpus contains 61 hours of consecutive and highly prosodic speech equipped with accurate text transcriptions and rich textual expressiveness annotations. Therefore, StoryTTS can aid future ETTS research to fully mine the abundant intrinsic textual and acoustic features. Experiments are conducted to validate that TTS models can generate speech with improved expressiveness when integrating with the annotated textual labels in StoryTTS.

This work studies the capabilities of a large language model (LLM) to understand paralinguistic aspects of speech without fine-tuning its weights. We utilize an end-to-end system with a speech encoder, which is trained to produce token embeddings such that the LLM's response to an expressive speech prompt is aligned with its response to a semantically matching text prompt that has also been conditioned on the user's speaking style. This framework enables the encoder to generate tokens that capture both linguistic and paralinguistic information and effectively convey them to the LLM, even when the LLM's weights remain completely frozen. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to explore how to induce a frozen LLM to understand more than just linguistic content from speech inputs in a general interaction setting. Experiments demonstrate that our system is able to produce higher quality and more empathetic responses to expressive speech prompts compared to several baselines.

This paper presents Att-HACK, the first large database of acted speech with social attitudes. Available databases of expressive speech are rare and very often restricted to the primary emotions: anger, joy, sadness, fear. This greatly limits the scope of the research on expressive speech. Besides, a fundamental aspect of speech prosody is always ignored and missing from such databases: its variety, i.e. the possibility to repeat an utterance while varying its prosody. This paper represents a first attempt to widen the scope of expressivity in speech, by providing a database of acted speech with social attitudes: friendly, seductive, dominant, and distant. The proposed database comprises 25 speakers interpreting 100 utterances in 4 social attitudes, with 3-5 repetitions each per attitude for a total of around 30 hours of speech. The Att-HACK is freely available for academic research under a Creative Commons Licence.

Text-to-Image (T2I) models often suffer from issues such as semantic leakage, incorrect feature binding, and omissions of key concepts in the generated image. This work studies these phenomena by looking into the role of information flow between textual token representations. To this end, we generate images by applying the diffusion component on a subset of contextual token representations in a given prompt and observe several interesting phenomena. First, in many cases, a word or multiword expression is fully represented by one or two tokens, while other tokens are redundant. For example, in "San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge", the token "gate" alone captures the full expression. We demonstrate the redundancy of these tokens by removing them after textual encoding and generating an image from the resulting representation. Surprisingly, we find that this process not only maintains image generation performance but also reduces errors by 21\% compared to standard generation. We then show that information can also flow between different expressions in a sentence, which often leads to semantic leakage. Based on this observation, we propose a simple, training-free method to mitigate semantic leakage: replacing the leaked item's representation after the textual encoding with its uncontextualized representation. Remarkably, this simple approach reduces semantic leakage by 85\%. Overall, our work provides a comprehensive analysis of information flow across textual tokens in T2I models, offering both novel insights and practical benefits.

While Current TTS systems perform well in synthesizing high-quality speech, producing highly expressive speech remains a challenge. Emphasis, as a critical factor in determining the expressiveness of speech, has attracted more attention nowadays. Previous works usually enhance the emphasis by adding intermediate features, but they can not guarantee the overall expressiveness of the speech. To resolve this matter, we propose Emphatic Expressive TTS (EE-TTS), which leverages multi-level linguistic information from syntax and semantics. EE-TTS contains an emphasis predictor that can identify appropriate emphasis positions from text and a conditioned acoustic model to synthesize expressive speech with emphasis and linguistic information. Experimental results indicate that EE-TTS outperforms baseline with MOS improvements of 0.49 and 0.67 in expressiveness and naturalness. EE-TTS also shows strong generalization across different datasets according to AB test results.

We present the KL3M tokenizers, a family of specialized tokenizers for legal, financial, and governmental text. Despite established work on tokenization, specialized tokenizers for professional domains remain understudied. Our paper offers two main contributions to this area. First, we introduce domain-specific BPE tokenizers for legal, financial, and governmental text. Our kl3m-004-128k-cased tokenizer uses 9-17% fewer tokens than GPT-4o and Llama3 for domain-specific documents, despite having a smaller vocabulary. For specialized terminology, our cased tokenizer is even more efficient, using up to 83% fewer tokens for legal terms and 39% fewer tokens for financial terms. Second, we develop character-level BPE tokenizers (4K, 8K, and 16K vocabulary sizes) for text correction tasks like OCR post-processing. These tokenizers keep consistent token boundaries between error-containing and correct text, making it easier for models to learn correction patterns. These tokenizers help professional applications by fitting more text in context windows, reducing computational needs, and preserving the meaning of domain-specific terms. Our analysis shows these efficiency gains directly benefit the processing of long legal and financial documents. We release all tokenizers and code through GitHub and Hugging Face to support further research in specialized tokenization.

We release Rasa, the first multilingual expressive TTS dataset for any Indian language, which contains 10 hours of neutral speech and 1-3 hours of expressive speech for each of the 6 Ekman emotions covering 3 languages: Assamese, Bengali, & Tamil. Our ablation studies reveal that just 1 hour of neutral and 30 minutes of expressive data can yield a Fair system as indicated by MUSHRA scores. Increasing neutral data to 10 hours, with minimal expressive data, significantly enhances expressiveness. This offers a practical recipe for resource-constrained languages, prioritizing easily obtainable neutral data alongside smaller amounts of expressive data. We show the importance of syllabically balanced data and pooling emotions to enhance expressiveness. We also highlight challenges in generating specific emotions, e.g., fear and surprise.

Text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated an unparalleled ability to generate high-quality, diverse images from a textual concept (e.g., "a doctor", "love"). However, the internal process of mapping text to a rich visual representation remains an enigma. In this work, we tackle the challenge of understanding concept representations in text-to-image models by decomposing an input text prompt into a small set of interpretable elements. This is achieved by learning a pseudo-token that is a sparse weighted combination of tokens from the model's vocabulary, with the objective of reconstructing the images generated for the given concept. Applied over the state-of-the-art Stable Diffusion model, this decomposition reveals non-trivial and surprising structures in the representations of concepts. For example, we find that some concepts such as "a president" or "a composer" are dominated by specific instances (e.g., "Obama", "Biden") and their interpolations. Other concepts, such as "happiness" combine associated terms that can be concrete ("family", "laughter") or abstract ("friendship", "emotion"). In addition to peering into the inner workings of Stable Diffusion, our method also enables applications such as single-image decomposition to tokens, bias detection and mitigation, and semantic image manipulation. Our code will be available at: https://hila-chefer.github.io/Conceptor/

Large Language Models have proven highly successful at modelling a variety of tasks. However, this comes at a steep computational cost that hinders wider industrial uptake. In this pa005 per, we present MWT: a Multi-Word Tokenizer that goes beyond word boundaries by representing frequent multi-word expressions as single tokens. MWTs produce a more compact and efficient tokenization that yields two benefits: (1) Increase in performance due to a greater coverage of input data given a fixed sequence length and budget; (2) Faster and lighter inference due to the ability to reduce the sequence length with negligible drops in performance. Our results show that MWT is more robust across shorter sequence lengths, thus allowing for major speedups via early sequence truncation.

We introduce methods to quantify how Large Language Models (LLMs) encode and store contextual information, revealing that tokens often seen as minor (e.g., determiners, punctuation) carry surprisingly high context. Notably, removing these tokens -- especially stopwords, articles, and commas -- consistently degrades performance on MMLU and BABILong-4k, even if removing only irrelevant tokens. Our analysis also shows a strong correlation between contextualization and linearity, where linearity measures how closely the transformation from one layer's embeddings to the next can be approximated by a single linear mapping. These findings underscore the hidden importance of filler tokens in maintaining context. For further exploration, we present LLM-Microscope, an open-source toolkit that assesses token-level nonlinearity, evaluates contextual memory, visualizes intermediate layer contributions (via an adapted Logit Lens), and measures the intrinsic dimensionality of representations. This toolkit illuminates how seemingly trivial tokens can be critical for long-range understanding.

The field of Text-to-Speech has experienced huge improvements last years benefiting from deep learning techniques. Producing realistic speech becomes possible now. As a consequence, the research on the control of the expressiveness, allowing to generate speech in different styles or manners, has attracted increasing attention lately. Systems able to control style have been developed and show impressive results. However the control parameters often consist of latent variables and remain complex to interpret. In this paper, we analyze and compare different latent spaces and obtain an interpretation of their influence on expressive speech. This will enable the possibility to build controllable speech synthesis systems with an understandable behaviour.

Generative models, widely utilized in various applications, can often struggle with prompts corresponding to partial tokens. This struggle stems from tokenization, where partial tokens fall out of distribution during inference, leading to incorrect or nonsensical outputs. This paper examines a technique to alleviate the tokenization artifact on text completion in generative models, maintaining performance even in regular non-subword cases. The method, termed token alignment, involves backtracking to the last complete tokens and ensuring the model's generation aligns with the prompt. This approach showcases marked improvement across many partial token scenarios, including nuanced cases like space-prefix and partial indentation, with only a minor time increase. The technique and analysis detailed in this paper contribute to the continuous advancement of generative models in handling partial inputs, bearing relevance for applications like code completion and text autocompletion.

Estimating uncertainty in Large Language Models (LLMs) is important for properly evaluating LLMs, and ensuring safety for users. However, prior approaches to uncertainty estimation focus on the final answer in generated text, ignoring intermediate steps that might dramatically impact the outcome. We hypothesize that there exist key forking tokens, such that re-sampling the system at those specific tokens, but not others, leads to very different outcomes. To test this empirically, we develop a novel approach to representing uncertainty dynamics across individual tokens of text generation, and applying statistical models to test our hypothesis. Our approach is highly flexible: it can be applied to any dataset and any LLM, without fine tuning or accessing model weights. We use our method to analyze LLM responses on 7 different tasks across 4 domains, spanning a wide range of typical use cases. We find many examples of forking tokens, including surprising ones such as punctuation marks, suggesting that LLMs are often just a single token away from saying something very different.

Tokenization is an important preprocessing step in the training and inference of large language models (LLMs). While there has been extensive research on the expressive power of the neural achitectures used in LLMs, the impact of tokenization has not been well understood. In this work, we demonstrate that tokenization, irrespective of the algorithm used, acts as an inverse homomorphism between strings and tokens. This suggests that the character space of the source language and the token space of the tokenized language are homomorphic, preserving the structural properties of the source language. Additionally, we explore the concept of proper tokenization, which refers to an unambiguous tokenization returned from the tokenizer. Our analysis reveals that the expressiveness of neural architectures in recognizing context-free languages is not affected by tokenization.

Recently, multimodal large language models (MM-LLMs) have achieved significant success in various tasks, but their high computational costs limit widespread application. The main computational burden arises from processing concatenated text and visual tokens in the LLM layer, where input token length directly affects efficiency. Our analysis of visual tokens reveals that their similarity to the CLS token follows a long-tail distribution, with only a few showing high similarity. To address this, we propose a dynamic pruning algorithm that identifies the inflection point in the visual CLS token similarity curve, enabling effective trimming of visual markers to accelerate model performance. Additionally, we perform a second round of pruning in the LLM layer, filtering out low-correlation tokens through the interaction between visual and textual features. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves performance comparable to the original while utilizing only 22% of the original token quantity. Our source code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

Tokenization is a fundamental preprocessing step in NLP, directly impacting large language models' (LLMs) ability to capture syntactic, morphosyntactic, and semantic structures. This paper introduces a novel framework for systematically evaluating tokenization strategies, addressing challenges in morphologically rich and low-resource languages. Using a Turkish dataset of 6,200 multiple-choice questions from the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark, the framework assesses tokenizers across five key metrics: vocabulary size, token count, processing time, language-specific token percentages (\%TR), and token purity. These metrics provide a structured approach to evaluating how well tokenizers preserve linguistic structures. While \%TR measures the proportion of valid words in the target language, \%Pure assesses the alignment of tokens with meaningful linguistic units, such as roots and valid morphemes, minimizing semantic fragmentation. The findings reveal that \%TR, introduced as a critical metric, exhibits a stronger correlation with downstream performance (e.g., MMLU scores) than token purity, emphasizing its role in improving model accuracy. Additionally, larger model parameters do not necessarily yield better tokenization quality or enhanced results, highlighting the importance of tailored tokenization strategies that prioritize linguistic alignment. This framework sets a new standard for developing robust tokenization methods optimized for morphologically complex and low-resource languages. Future work will refine morphological analysis, explore domain-specific customizations, and conduct cross-linguistic evaluations to further enhance tokenization practices.

People worldwide use language in subtle and complex ways to express emotions. While emotion recognition -- an umbrella term for several NLP tasks -- significantly impacts different applications in NLP and other fields, most work in the area is focused on high-resource languages. Therefore, this has led to major disparities in research and proposed solutions, especially for low-resource languages that suffer from the lack of high-quality datasets. In this paper, we present BRIGHTER-- a collection of multilabeled emotion-annotated datasets in 28 different languages. BRIGHTER covers predominantly low-resource languages from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, with instances from various domains annotated by fluent speakers. We describe the data collection and annotation processes and the challenges of building these datasets. Then, we report different experimental results for monolingual and crosslingual multi-label emotion identification, as well as intensity-level emotion recognition. We investigate results with and without using LLMs and analyse the large variability in performance across languages and text domains. We show that BRIGHTER datasets are a step towards bridging the gap in text-based emotion recognition and discuss their impact and utility.

Masked Language Modeling (MLM) has been one of the most prominent approaches for pretraining bidirectional text encoders due to its simplicity and effectiveness. One notable concern about MLM is that the special [MASK] symbol causes a discrepancy between pretraining data and downstream data as it is present only in pretraining but not in fine-tuning. In this work, we offer a new perspective on the consequence of such a discrepancy: We demonstrate empirically and theoretically that MLM pretraining allocates some model dimensions exclusively for representing [MASK] tokens, resulting in a representation deficiency for real tokens and limiting the pretrained model's expressiveness when it is adapted to downstream data without [MASK] tokens. Motivated by the identified issue, we propose MAE-LM, which pretrains the Masked Autoencoder architecture with MLM where [MASK] tokens are excluded from the encoder. Empirically, we show that MAE-LM improves the utilization of model dimensions for real token representations, and MAE-LM consistently outperforms MLM-pretrained models across different pretraining settings and model sizes when fine-tuned on the GLUE and SQuAD benchmarks.

Tokenization plays a critical role in language modeling, yet existing approaches such as Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) or WordPiece operate purely on frequency statistics, ignoring the underlying semantic structure of text. This leads to over-tokenization of semantically redundant spans and underutilization of contextual coherence, particularly in long-context scenarios. In this work, we propose SemToken, a semantic-aware tokenization framework that jointly reduces token redundancy and improves computation efficiency. SemToken first extracts contextual semantic embeddings via lightweight encoders and performs local semantic clustering to merge semantically equivalent tokens. Then, it allocates heterogeneous token granularity based on semantic density, allowing finer-grained tokenization in content-rich regions and coarser compression in repetitive or low-entropy spans. SemToken can be seamlessly integrated with modern language models and attention acceleration methods. Experiments on long-context language modeling benchmarks such as WikiText-103 and LongBench show that SemToken achieves up to 2.4times reduction in token count and 1.9times speedup, with negligible or no degradation in perplexity and downstream accuracy. Our findings suggest that semantic structure offers a promising new axis for optimizing tokenization and computation in large language models.

Recent advancements in large language models(LLMs), such as GPT-4 and GPT-4o, have shown exceptional performance, especially in languages with abundant resources like English, thanks to extensive datasets that ensure robust training. Conversely, these models exhibit limitations when processing under-resourced languages such as Chinese and Korean, where issues including hallucinatory responses remain prevalent. This paper traces the roots of these disparities to the tokenization process inherent to these models. Specifically, it explores how the tokenizers vocabulary, often used to speed up the tokenization process and reduce tokens but constructed independently of the actual model training data, inadequately represents non-English languages. This misrepresentation results in the propagation of under-trained or untrained tokens, which perpetuate biases and pose serious concerns related to data security and ethical standards. We aim to dissect the tokenization mechanics of GPT-4o, illustrating how its simplified token-handling methods amplify these risks and offer strategic solutions to mitigate associated security and ethical issues. Through this study, we emphasize the critical need to rethink tokenization frameworks to foster more equitable and secure AI technologies. The code and data are available at https://github.com/yeyimilk/LLMGPT4o

Predicting context-dependent and non-literal utterances like sarcastic and ironic expressions still remains a challenging task in NLP, as it goes beyond linguistic patterns, encompassing common sense and shared knowledge as crucial components. To capture complex morpho-syntactic features that can usually serve as indicators for irony or sarcasm across dynamic contexts, we propose a model that uses character-level vector representations of words, based on ELMo. We test our model on 7 different datasets derived from 3 different data sources, providing state-of-the-art performance in 6 of them, and otherwise offering competitive results.

Many frameworks for emotional text-to-speech (E-TTS) rely on human-annotated emotion labels that are often inaccurate and difficult to obtain. Learning emotional prosody implicitly presents a tough challenge due to the subjective nature of emotions. In this study, we propose a novel approach that leverages text awareness to acquire emotional styles without the need for explicit emotion labels or text prompts. We present TEMOTTS, a two-stage framework for E-TTS that is trained without emotion labels and is capable of inference without auxiliary inputs. Our proposed method performs knowledge transfer between the linguistic space learned by BERT and the emotional style space constructed by global style tokens. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, showcasing improvements in emotional accuracy and naturalness. This is one of the first studies to leverage the emotional correlation between spoken content and expressive delivery for emotional TTS.

While language models are increasingly utilized in materials science, typical models rely on frequency-centric tokenization methods originally developed for natural language processing. However, these methods frequently produce excessive fragmentation and semantic loss, failing to maintain the structural and semantic integrity of material concepts. To address this issue, we propose MATTER, a novel tokenization approach that integrates material knowledge into tokenization. Based on MatDetector trained on our materials knowledge base and a re-ranking method prioritizing material concepts in token merging, MATTER maintains the structural integrity of identified material concepts and prevents fragmentation during tokenization, ensuring their semantic meaning remains intact. The experimental results demonstrate that MATTER outperforms existing tokenization methods, achieving an average performance gain of 4% and 2% in the generation and classification tasks, respectively. These results underscore the importance of domain knowledge for tokenization strategies in scientific text processing. Our code is available at https://github.com/yerimoh/MATTER

The ability to process idiomatic or literal multiword expressions is a crucial aspect of understanding and generating any language. The task of generating contextually relevant continuations for narratives containing idiomatic (or literal) expressions can allow us to test the ability of generative language models (LMs) in understanding nuanced language containing non-compositional figurative text. We conduct a series of experiments using datasets in two distinct languages (English and Portuguese) under three different training settings (zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuned). Our results suggest that the models are only slightly better at generating continuations for literal contexts than idiomatic contexts, with exceedingly small margins. Furthermore, the models studied in this work perform equally well across both languages, indicating the robustness of generative models in performing this task.

Common subword tokenization algorithms like BPE and UnigramLM assume that text can be split into meaningful units by concatenative measures alone. This is not true for languages such as Hebrew and Arabic, where morphology is encoded in root-template patterns, or Malay and Georgian, where split affixes are common. We present SPLINTER, a pre-processing step which rearranges text into a linear form that better represents such nonconcatenative morphologies, enabling meaningful contiguous segments to be found by the tokenizer. We demonstrate SPLINTER's merit using both intrinsic measures evaluating token vocabularies in Hebrew, Arabic, and Malay; as well as on downstream tasks using BERT-architecture models trained for Hebrew.

Tokenization is a foundational step in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, bridging raw text and language models. Existing tokenization approaches like Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) originate from the field of data compression, and it has been suggested that the effectiveness of BPE stems from its ability to condense text into a relatively small number of tokens. We test the hypothesis that fewer tokens lead to better downstream performance by introducing PathPiece, a new tokenizer that segments a document's text into the minimum number of tokens for a given vocabulary. Through extensive experimentation we find this hypothesis not to be the case, casting doubt on the understanding of the reasons for effective tokenization. To examine which other factors play a role, we evaluate design decisions across all three phases of tokenization: pre-tokenization, vocabulary construction, and segmentation, offering new insights into the design of effective tokenizers. Specifically, we illustrate the importance of pre-tokenization and the benefits of using BPE to initialize vocabulary construction. We train 64 language models with varying tokenization, ranging in size from 350M to 2.4B parameters, all of which are made publicly available.

We present Neural Attention Search (NAtS), a framework that automatically evaluates the importance of each token within a sequence and determines if the corresponding token can be dropped after several steps. This approach can efficiently reduce the KV cache sizes required by transformer-based models during inference and thus reduce inference costs. In this paper, we design a search space that contains three token types: (i) Global Tokens will be preserved and queried by all the following tokens. (ii) Local Tokens survive until the next global token appears. (iii) Sliding Window Tokens have an impact on the inference of a fixed size of the next following tokens. Similar to the One-Shot Neural Architecture Search approach, this token-type information can be learned jointly with the architecture weights via a learnable attention mask. Experiments on both training a new transformer from scratch and fine-tuning existing large language models show that NAtS can efficiently reduce the KV cache size required for the models while maintaining the models' performance.

Recent progress in natural language processing has been adapted to the symbolic music modality. Language models, such as Transformers, have been used with symbolic music for a variety of tasks among which music generation, modeling or transcription, with state-of-the-art performances. These models are beginning to be used in production products. To encode and decode music for the backbone model, they need to rely on tokenizers, whose role is to serialize music into sequences of distinct elements called tokens. MidiTok is an open-source library allowing to tokenize symbolic music with great flexibility and extended features. It features the most popular music tokenizations, under a unified API. It is made to be easily used and extensible for everyone.

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.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization across diverse tasks, leading individuals to increasingly use them as personal assistants and universal computing engines. Nevertheless, a notable obstacle emerges when feeding numerical/temporal data into these models, such as data sourced from wearables or electronic health records. LLMs employ tokenizers in their input that break down text into smaller units. However, tokenizers are not designed to represent numerical values and might struggle to understand repetitive patterns and context, treating consecutive values as separate tokens and disregarding their temporal relationships. Here, we discuss recent works that employ LLMs for human-centric tasks such as in mobile health sensing and present a case study showing that popular LLMs tokenize temporal data incorrectly. To address that, we highlight potential solutions such as prompt tuning with lightweight embedding layers as well as multimodal adapters, that can help bridge this "modality gap". While the capability of language models to generalize to other modalities with minimal or no finetuning is exciting, this paper underscores the fact that their outputs cannot be meaningful if they stumble over input nuances.

Large pretrained language models (LLMs) can be rapidly adapted to a wide variety of tasks via a text-to-text approach, where the instruction and input are fed to the model in natural language. Combined with in-context learning (ICL), this paradigm is impressively flexible and powerful. However, it also burdens users with an overwhelming number of choices, many of them arbitrary. Inspired by markup languages like HTML, we contribute a method of using soft-token tags to compose prompt templates. This approach reduces arbitrary decisions and streamlines the application of ICL. Our method is a form of meta-learning for ICL; it learns these tags in advance during a parameter-efficient fine-tuning ``warm-up'' process. The tags can subsequently be used in templates for ICL on new, unseen tasks without any additional fine-tuning. Our experiments with this approach yield promising initial results, improving LLM performance on important enterprise applications such as few-shot and open-world intent detection, as well as text classification in news and legal domains.

Typically, tokenization is the very first step in most text processing works. As a token serves as an atomic unit that embeds the contextual information of text, how to define a token plays a decisive role in the performance of a model.Even though Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) has been considered the de facto standard tokenization method due to its simplicity and universality, it still remains unclear whether BPE works best across all languages and tasks. In this paper, we test several tokenization strategies in order to answer our primary research question, that is, "What is the best tokenization strategy for Korean NLP tasks?" Experimental results demonstrate that a hybrid approach of morphological segmentation followed by BPE works best in Korean to/from English machine translation and natural language understanding tasks such as KorNLI, KorSTS, NSMC, and PAWS-X. As an exception, for KorQuAD, the Korean extension of SQuAD, BPE segmentation turns out to be the most effective.

Subword tokenization has become the de-facto standard for tokenization, although comparative evaluations of subword vocabulary quality across languages are scarce. Existing evaluation studies focus on the effect of a tokenization algorithm on the performance in downstream tasks, or on engineering criteria such as the compression rate. We present a new evaluation paradigm that focuses on the cognitive plausibility of subword tokenization. We analyze the correlation of the tokenizer output with the response time and accuracy of human performance on a lexical decision task. We compare three tokenization algorithms across several languages and vocabulary sizes. Our results indicate that the UnigramLM algorithm yields less cognitively plausible tokenization behavior and a worse coverage of derivational morphemes, in contrast with prior work.

In most cases, word embeddings are learned only from raw tokens or in some cases, lemmas. This includes pre-trained language models like BERT. To investigate on the potential of capturing deeper relations between lexical items and structures and to filter out redundant information, we propose to preserve the morphological, syntactic and other types of linguistic information by combining them with the raw tokens or lemmas. This means, for example, including parts-of-speech or dependency information within the used lexical features. The word embeddings can then be trained on the combinations instead of just raw tokens. It is also possible to later apply this method to the pre-training of huge language models and possibly enhance their performance. This would aid in tackling problems which are more sophisticated from the point of view of linguistic representation, such as detection of cyberbullying.

Character-level language models obviate the need for separately trained tokenizers, but efficiency suffers from longer sequence lengths. Learning to combine character representations into tokens has made training these models more efficient, but they still require decoding characters individually. We propose Toucan, an augmentation to character-level models to make them "token-aware". Comparing our method to prior work, we demonstrate significant speed-ups in character generation without a loss in language modeling performance. We then explore differences between our learned dynamic tokenization of character sequences with popular fixed vocabulary solutions such as Byte-Pair Encoding and WordPiece, finding our approach leads to a greater amount of longer sequences tokenized as single items. Our project and code are available at https://nlp.jhu.edu/nuggets/.

In infilling tasks, sub-tokens, representing instances where a complete token is segmented into two parts, often emerge at the boundaries of prefixes, middles, and suffixes. Traditional methods focused on training models at the token level, leading to sub-optimal performance in character-level infilling tasks during the inference stage. Alternately, some approaches considered character-level infilling, but they relied on predicting sub-tokens in inference, yet this strategy diminished ability in character-level infilling tasks due to the large perplexity of the model on sub-tokens. In this paper, we introduce FIM-SE, which stands for Fill-In-the-Middle with both Starting and Ending character constraints. The proposed method addresses character-level infilling tasks by utilizing a line-level format to avoid predicting any sub-token in inference. In addition, we incorporate two special tokens to signify the rest of the incomplete lines, thereby enhancing generation guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach surpasses previous methods, offering a significant advantage. Code is available at https://github.com/SenseLLM/FIM-SE.

We introduce XED, a multilingual fine-grained emotion dataset. The dataset consists of human-annotated Finnish (25k) and English sentences (30k), as well as projected annotations for 30 additional languages, providing new resources for many low-resource languages. We use Plutchik's core emotions to annotate the dataset with the addition of neutral to create a multilabel multiclass dataset. The dataset is carefully evaluated using language-specific BERT models and SVMs to show that XED performs on par with other similar datasets and is therefore a useful tool for sentiment analysis and emotion detection.

Euphemisms have not received much attention in natural language processing, despite being an important element of polite and figurative language. Euphemisms prove to be a difficult topic, not only because they are subject to language change, but also because humans may not agree on what is a euphemism and what is not. Nevertheless, the first step to tackling the issue is to collect and analyze examples of euphemisms. We present a corpus of potentially euphemistic terms (PETs) along with example texts from the GloWbE corpus. Additionally, we present a subcorpus of texts where these PETs are not being used euphemistically, which may be useful for future applications. We also discuss the results of multiple analyses run on the corpus. Firstly, we find that sentiment analysis on the euphemistic texts supports that PETs generally decrease negative and offensive sentiment. Secondly, we observe cases of disagreement in an annotation task, where humans are asked to label PETs as euphemistic or not in a subset of our corpus text examples. We attribute the disagreement to a variety of potential reasons, including if the PET was a commonly accepted term (CAT).

What are the units of text that we want to model? From bytes to multi-word expressions, text can be analyzed and generated at many granularities. Until recently, most natural language processing (NLP) models operated over words, treating those as discrete and atomic tokens, but starting with byte-pair encoding (BPE), subword-based approaches have become dominant in many areas, enabling small vocabularies while still allowing for fast inference. Is the end of the road character-level model or byte-level processing? In this survey, we connect several lines of work from the pre-neural and neural era, by showing how hybrid approaches of words and characters as well as subword-based approaches based on learned segmentation have been proposed and evaluated. We conclude that there is and likely will never be a silver bullet singular solution for all applications and that thinking seriously about tokenization remains important for many applications.

Tokenization is a fundamental preprocessing step in Natural Language Processing (NLP), significantly impacting the capability of large language models (LLMs) to capture linguistic and semantic nuances. This study introduces a novel evaluation framework addressing tokenization challenges specific to morphologically-rich and low-resource languages such as Turkish. Utilizing the Turkish MMLU (TR-MMLU) dataset, comprising 6,200 multiple-choice questions from the Turkish education system, we assessed tokenizers based on vocabulary size, token count, processing time, language-specific token percentages (\%TR), and token purity (\%Pure). These newly proposed metrics measure how effectively tokenizers preserve linguistic structures. Our analysis reveals that language-specific token percentages exhibit a stronger correlation with downstream performance (e.g., MMLU scores) than token purity. Furthermore, increasing model parameters alone does not necessarily enhance linguistic performance, underscoring the importance of tailored, language-specific tokenization methods. The proposed framework establishes robust and practical tokenization standards for morphologically complex languages.

Subword tokenization has been widely successful in text-based natural language processing (NLP) tasks with Transformer-based models. As Transformer models become increasingly popular in symbolic music-related studies, it is imperative to investigate the efficacy of subword tokenization in the symbolic music domain. In this paper, we explore subword tokenization techniques, such as byte-pair encoding (BPE), in symbolic music generation and its impact on the overall structure of generated songs. Our experiments are based on three types of MIDI datasets: single track-melody only, multi-track with a single instrument, and multi-track and multi-instrument. We apply subword tokenization on post-musical tokenization schemes and find that it enables the generation of longer songs at the same time and improves the overall structure of the generated music in terms of objective metrics like structure indicator (SI), Pitch Class Entropy, etc. We also compare two subword tokenization methods, BPE and Unigram, and observe that both methods lead to consistent improvements. Our study suggests that subword tokenization is a promising technique for symbolic music generation and may have broader implications for music composition, particularly in cases involving complex data such as multi-track songs.

In recent years, general visual foundation models (VFMs) have witnessed increasing adoption, particularly as image encoders for popular multi-modal large language models (MLLMs). However, without semantically fine-grained supervision, these models still encounter fundamental prediction errors in the context of downstream text-image-related tasks, i.e., perception, understanding and reasoning with images containing small and dense texts. To bridge this gap, we develop TokenOCR, the first token-level visual foundation model specifically tailored for text-image-related tasks, designed to support a variety of traditional downstream applications. To facilitate the pretraining of TokenOCR, we also devise a high-quality data production pipeline that constructs the first token-level image text dataset, TokenIT, comprising 20 million images and 1.8 billion token-mask pairs. Furthermore, leveraging this foundation with exceptional image-as-text capability, we seamlessly replace previous VFMs with TokenOCR to construct a document-level MLLM, TokenVL, for VQA-based document understanding tasks. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of TokenOCR and TokenVL. Code, datasets, and weights will be available at https://token-family.github.io/TokenOCR_project.

The objective of this paper is to predict (A) whether a sentence in a written text expresses an emotion, (B) the mode(s) in which it is expressed, (C) whether it is basic or complex, and (D) its emotional category. One of our major contributions, through a dataset and a model, is to integrate the fact that an emotion can be expressed in different modes: from a direct mode, essentially lexicalized, to a more indirect mode, where emotions will only be suggested, a mode that NLP approaches generally don't take into account. Another originality is that the scope is on written texts, as opposed usual work focusing on conversational (often multi-modal) data. In this context, modes of expression are seen as a factor towards the automatic analysis of complexity in texts. Experiments on French texts show acceptable results compared to the human annotators' agreement, and outperforming results compared to using a large language model with in-context learning (i.e. no fine-tuning).

Tokenization efficiency plays a critical role in the performance and cost of large language models (LLMs), yet most models rely on static tokenizers optimized for general-purpose corpora. These tokenizers' fixed vocabularies often fail to adapt to domain- or language-specific inputs, leading to longer token sequences and higher computational costs. We introduce zip2zip, a framework that enables LLMs to dynamically adjust token vocabulary at inference time, allowing for fewer generated tokens and thus faster inference. zip2zip consists of three key components: (1) a tokenizer based on Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) compression that incrementally compresses tokens into reusable "hypertokens" on the fly; (2) an embedding layer that computes embeddings for newly formed hypertokens at runtime; and (3) a causal language modeling variant that trains the model to operate on hypertokenized, compressed sequences. We show that an existing LLM can be zip2zip-fied in 10 GPU-hours via parameter-efficient finetuning. The resulting zip2zip LLMs effectively learn to use hypertokens at inference time, reducing input and output sequence length by 20-60\%, with significant improvements in inference latency.

Large Language Models (LLMs) based on transformer architectures have revolutionized a variety of domains, with tokenization playing a pivotal role in their pre-processing and fine-tuning stages. In multilingual models, particularly those tailored for Indic languages, effective tokenization is crucial for optimizing performance. This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of tokenizers used by 12 LLMs across all 22 official languages of India, with a focus on comparing the efficiency of their tokenization processes. We employed the Normalized Sequence Length (NSL) as a key metric in our analysis. Our findings reveal that the SUTRA tokenizer outperforms all other models, including several Indic-specific models, excelling in 14 languages. Notable insights include the SUTRA tokenizer's superior handling of Indic languages, GPT-4o's advancement over its predecessor GPT-4 in processing Indian languages, and the limited performance of Project Indus in certain languages. This study underscores the critical importance of developing targeted tokenization strategies for multilingual and Indic-centric models, laying the groundwork for future improvements in tokenizer design to enhance linguistic coverage and model efficiency.

We present the first sizeable corpus of Thai speech emotion recognition, THAI-SER, containing 41 hours and 36 minutes (27,854 utterances) from 100 recordings made in different recording environments: Zoom and two studio setups. The recordings contain both scripted and improvised sessions, acted by 200 professional actors (112 females and 88 males, aged 18 to 55) and were directed by professional directors. There are five primary emotions: neutral, angry, happy, sad, and frustrated, assigned to the actors when recording utterances. The utterances are annotated with an emotional category using crowdsourcing. To control the annotation process's quality, we also design an extensive filtering and quality control scheme to ensure that the majority agreement score remains above 0.71. We evaluate our annotated corpus using two metrics: inter-annotator reliability and human recognition accuracy. Inter-annotator reliability score was calculated using Krippendorff's alpha, where our corpus, after filtering, achieved an alpha score of 0.692, higher than a recommendation of 0.667. For human recognition accuracy, our corpus scored up to 0.772 post-filtering. We also provide the results of the model trained on the corpus evaluated on both in-corpus and cross-corpus setups. The corpus is publicly available under a Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0, as well as our codes for the experiments.

Text-based foundation models have become an important part of scientific discovery, with molecular foundation models accelerating advancements in material science and molecular design.However, existing models are constrained by closed-vocabulary tokenizers that capture only a fraction of molecular space. In this work, we systematically evaluate 34 tokenizers, including 19 chemistry-specific ones, and reveal significant gaps in their coverage of the SMILES molecular representation. To assess the impact of tokenizer choice, we introduce n-gram language models as a low-cost proxy and validate their effectiveness by pretraining and finetuning 18 RoBERTa-style encoders for molecular property prediction. To overcome the limitations of existing tokenizers, we propose two new tokenizers -- Smirk and Smirk-GPE -- with full coverage of the OpenSMILES specification. The proposed tokenizers systematically integrate nuclear, electronic, and geometric degrees of freedom; facilitating applications in pharmacology, agriculture, biology, and energy storage. Our results highlight the need for open-vocabulary modeling and chemically diverse benchmarks in cheminformatics.

Tokenization plays a pivotal role in natural language processing (NLP), shaping how text is segmented and interpreted by language models. While subword methods such as Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) and WordPiece have been effective, they often struggle with morphologically rich and agglutinative languages because they rely on frequency rather than linguistic structure. We introduce a hybrid tokenization framework that combines rule-based morphological analysis with statistical subword segmentation. The method uses phonological normalization, root-affix dictionaries, and a novel algorithm that balances morpheme preservation with vocabulary efficiency. It assigns shared identifiers to phonologically variant affixes (e.g., -ler and -lar) and altered root forms (e.g., kitap vs. kitab{\i}), reducing redundancy while maintaining semantic integrity. Special tokens are added for whitespace and case, including an UPPERCASE marker to avoid vocabulary inflation from capitalization. BPE is integrated for out-of-vocabulary coverage without harming morphological coherence. On the TR-MMLU benchmark, the tokenizer achieves the highest Turkish Token Percentage (90.29\%) and Pure Token Percentage (85.8\%). Comparisons with tokenizers from LLaMA, Gemma, and GPT show more linguistically meaningful and coherent tokens. Although demonstrated on Turkish, the approach is language-independent and adaptable to other languages, offering a practical path toward more interpretable and effective multilingual NLP systems.

Figures of speech such as metaphors, similes, and idioms allow language to be expressive, invoke emotion, and communicate abstract ideas that might otherwise be difficult to visualize. These figurative forms are often conveyed through multiple modes, such as text and images, and frequently appear in advertising, news, social media, etc. Understanding multimodal figurative language is an essential component of human communication, and it plays a significant role in our daily interactions. While humans can intuitively understand multimodal figurative language, this poses a challenging task for machines that requires the cognitive ability to map between domains, abstraction, commonsense, and profound language and cultural knowledge. In this work, we propose the Image Recognition of Figurative Language dataset to examine vision and language models' understanding of figurative language. We leverage human annotation and an automatic pipeline we created to generate a multimodal dataset and introduce two novel tasks as a benchmark for multimodal figurative understanding. We experiment with several baseline models and find that all perform substantially worse than humans. We hope our dataset and benchmark will drive the development of models that will better understand figurative language.

Understanding emotion expressed in language has a wide range of applications, from building empathetic chatbots to detecting harmful online behavior. Advancement in this area can be improved using large-scale datasets with a fine-grained typology, adaptable to multiple downstream tasks. We introduce GoEmotions, the largest manually annotated dataset of 58k English Reddit comments, labeled for 27 emotion categories or Neutral. We demonstrate the high quality of the annotations via Principal Preserved Component Analysis. We conduct transfer learning experiments with existing emotion benchmarks to show that our dataset generalizes well to other domains and different emotion taxonomies. Our BERT-based model achieves an average F1-score of .46 across our proposed taxonomy, leaving much room for improvement.

We present Bloom Library, a linguistically diverse set of multimodal and multilingual datasets for language modeling, image captioning, visual storytelling, and speech synthesis/recognition. These datasets represent either the most, or among the most, multilingual datasets for each of the included downstream tasks. In total, the initial release of the Bloom Library datasets covers 363 languages across 32 language families. We train downstream task models for various languages represented in the data, showing the viability of the data for future work in low-resource, multimodal NLP and establishing the first known baselines for these downstream tasks in certain languages (e.g., Bisu [bzi], with an estimated population of 700 users). Some of these first-of-their-kind baselines are comparable to state-of-the-art performance for higher-resourced languages. The Bloom Library datasets are released under Creative Commons licenses on the Hugging Face datasets hub to catalyze more linguistically diverse research in the included downstream tasks.

Recent language models have shown impressive multilingual performance, even when not explicitly trained for it. Despite this, there are concerns about the quality of their outputs across different languages. In this paper, we show how disparity in the treatment of different languages arises at the tokenization stage, well before a model is even invoked. The same text translated into different languages can have drastically different tokenization lengths, with differences up to 15 times in some cases. These disparities persist even for tokenizers that are intentionally trained for multilingual support. Character-level and byte-level models also exhibit over 4 times the difference in the encoding length for some language pairs. This induces unfair treatment for some language communities in regard to the cost of accessing commercial language services, the processing time and latency, as well as the amount of content that can be provided as context to the models. Therefore, we make the case that we should train future language models using multilingually fair subword tokenizers.

Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) serves as a foundation method for text tokenization in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field. Despite its wide adoption, the original BPE algorithm harbors an inherent flaw: it inadvertently introduces a frequency imbalance for tokens in the text corpus. Since BPE iteratively merges the most frequent token pair in the text corpus while keeping all tokens that have been merged in the vocabulary, it unavoidably holds tokens that primarily represent subwords of complete words and appear infrequently on their own in the text corpus. We term such tokens as Scaffold Tokens. Due to their infrequent appearance in the text corpus, Scaffold Tokens pose a learning imbalance issue for language models. To address that issue, we propose Scaffold-BPE, which incorporates a dynamic scaffold token removal mechanism by parameter-free, computation-light, and easy-to-implement modifications to the original BPE. This novel approach ensures the exclusion of low-frequency Scaffold Tokens from the token representations for the given texts, thereby mitigating the issue of frequency imbalance and facilitating model training. On extensive experiments across language modeling tasks and machine translation tasks, Scaffold-BPE consistently outperforms the original BPE, well demonstrating its effectiveness and superiority.

This study investigates the impact of morphological typology on tokenization and language modeling performance. We focus on languages with synthetic and analytical morphological structures and examine their productivity when tokenized using the byte-pair encoding (BPE) algorithm. We compare the performance of models trained with similar amounts of data in different languages. Our experiments reveal that languages with synthetic features exhibit greater subword regularity and productivity with BPE tokenization and achieve better results in language modeling tasks. We also observe that the typological continuum from linguistic theory is reflected in several experiments. These findings suggest a correlation between morphological typology and BPE tokenization efficiency.

Figurative and non-literal expressions are profoundly integrated in human communication. Visualising such expressions allow us to convey our creative thoughts, and evoke nuanced emotions. Recent text-to-image models like Stable Diffusion, on the other hand, struggle to depict non-literal expressions. Recent works primarily deal with this issue by compiling humanly annotated datasets on a small scale, which not only demands specialised expertise but also proves highly inefficient. To address this issue, we introduce ViPE: Visualise Pretty-much Everything. ViPE offers a series of lightweight and robust language models that have been trained on a large-scale set of lyrics with noisy visual descriptions that represent their implicit meaning. The synthetic visual descriptions are generated by GPT3.5 relying on neither human annotations nor images. ViPE effectively expresses any arbitrary piece of text into a visualisable description, enabling meaningful and high-quality image generation. We provide compelling evidence that ViPE is more robust than GPT3.5 in synthesising visual elaborations. ViPE also exhibits an understanding of figurative expressions comparable to human experts, providing a powerful and open-source backbone to many downstream applications such as music video and caption generation.

In this paper, we present the main findings and compare the results of SemEval-2020 Task 10, Emphasis Selection for Written Text in Visual Media. The goal of this shared task is to design automatic methods for emphasis selection, i.e. choosing candidates for emphasis in textual content to enable automated design assistance in authoring. The main focus is on short text instances for social media, with a variety of examples, from social media posts to inspirational quotes. Participants were asked to model emphasis using plain text with no additional context from the user or other design considerations. SemEval-2020 Emphasis Selection shared task attracted 197 participants in the early phase and a total of 31 teams made submissions to this task. The highest-ranked submission achieved 0.823 Matchm score. The analysis of systems submitted to the task indicates that BERT and RoBERTa were the most common choice of pre-trained models used, and part of speech tag (POS) was the most useful feature. Full results can be found on the task's website.

Most current popular subword tokenizers are trained based on word frequency statistics over a corpus, without considering information about co-occurrence or context. Nevertheless, the resulting vocabularies are used in language models' highly contextualized settings. We present SaGe, a tokenizer that tailors subwords for their downstream use by baking in the contextualized signal at the vocabulary creation phase. We show that SaGe does a better job than current widespread tokenizers in keeping token contexts cohesive, while not incurring a large price in terms of encoding efficiency or domain robustness. SaGe improves performance on English GLUE classification tasks as well as on NER, and on Inference and NER in Turkish, demonstrating its robustness to language properties such as morphological exponence and agglutination.

We present DictaBERT, a new state-of-the-art pre-trained BERT model for modern Hebrew, outperforming existing models on most benchmarks. Additionally, we release two fine-tuned versions of the model, designed to perform two specific foundational tasks in the analysis of Hebrew texts: prefix segmentation and morphological tagging. These fine-tuned models allow any developer to perform prefix segmentation and morphological tagging of a Hebrew sentence with a single call to a HuggingFace model, without the need to integrate any additional libraries or code. In this paper we describe the details of the training as well and the results on the different benchmarks. We release the models to the community, along with sample code demonstrating their use. We release these models as part of our goal to help further research and development in Hebrew NLP.

Despite the widespread use of Transformer-based text embedding models in NLP tasks, surprising 'sticky tokens' can undermine the reliability of embeddings. These tokens, when repeatedly inserted into sentences, pull sentence similarity toward a certain value, disrupting the normal distribution of embedding distances and degrading downstream performance. In this paper, we systematically investigate such anomalous tokens, formally defining them and introducing an efficient detection method, Sticky Token Detector (STD), based on sentence and token filtering. Applying STD to 40 checkpoints across 14 model families, we discover a total of 868 sticky tokens. Our analysis reveals that these tokens often originate from special or unused entries in the vocabulary, as well as fragmented subwords from multilingual corpora. Notably, their presence does not strictly correlate with model size or vocabulary size. We further evaluate how sticky tokens affect downstream tasks like clustering and retrieval, observing significant performance drops of up to 50%. Through attention-layer analysis, we show that sticky tokens disproportionately dominate the model's internal representations, raising concerns about tokenization robustness. Our findings show the need for better tokenization strategies and model design to mitigate the impact of sticky tokens in future text embedding applications.

Masked Language Models (MLMs) have achieved remarkable success in many self-supervised representation learning tasks. MLMs are trained by randomly masking portions of the input sequences with [MASK] tokens and learning to reconstruct the original content based on the remaining context. This paper explores the impact of [MASK] tokens on MLMs. Analytical studies show that masking tokens can introduce the corrupted semantics problem, wherein the corrupted context may convey multiple, ambiguous meanings. This problem is also a key factor affecting the performance of MLMs on downstream tasks. Based on these findings, we propose a novel enhanced-context MLM, ExLM. Our approach expands [MASK] tokens in the input context and models the dependencies between these expanded states. This enhancement increases context capacity and enables the model to capture richer semantic information, effectively mitigating the corrupted semantics problem during pre-training. Experimental results demonstrate that ExLM achieves significant performance improvements in both text modeling and SMILES modeling tasks. Further analysis confirms that ExLM enriches semantic representations through context enhancement, and effectively reduces the semantic multimodality commonly observed in MLMs.

We study the ability of transformer-based language models (LMs) to understand social media language. Social media (SM) language is distinct from standard written language, yet existing benchmarks fall short of capturing LM performance in this socially, economically, and politically important domain. We quantify the degree to which social media language differs from conventional language and conclude that the difference is significant both in terms of token distribution and rate of linguistic shift. Next, we introduce a new benchmark for Social MedIa Language Evaluation (SMILE) that covers four SM platforms and eleven tasks. Finally, we show that learning a tokenizer and pretraining on a mix of social media and conventional language yields an LM that outperforms the best similar-sized alternative by 4.2 points on the overall SMILE score.

Subword tokenization is the de facto standard for tokenization in neural language models and machine translation systems. Three advantages are frequently cited in favor of subwords: shorter encoding of frequent tokens, compositionality of subwords, and ability to deal with unknown words. As their relative importance is not entirely clear yet, we propose a tokenization approach that enables us to separate frequency (the first advantage) from compositionality. The approach uses Huffman coding to tokenize words, by order of frequency, using a fixed amount of symbols. Experiments with CS-DE, EN-FR and EN-DE NMT show that frequency alone accounts for 90%-95% of the scores reached by BPE, hence compositionality has less importance than previously thought.

Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on the Key-Value (KV) Cache to store token history, enabling efficient decoding of tokens. As the KV-Cache grows, it becomes a major memory and computation bottleneck, however, there is an opportunity to alleviate this bottleneck, especially because prior research has shown that only a small subset of tokens contribute meaningfully to each decoding step. A key challenge in finding these critical tokens is that they are dynamic, and heavily input query-dependent. Existing methods either risk quality by evicting tokens permanently, or retain the full KV-Cache but rely on retrieving chunks (pages) of tokens at generation, failing at dense, context-rich tasks. Additionally, many existing KV-Cache sparsity methods rely on inaccurate proxies for token importance. To address these limitations, we introduce TokenButler, a high-granularity, query-aware predictor that learns to identify these critical tokens. By training a light-weight predictor with less than 1.2% parameter overhead, TokenButler prioritizes tokens based on their contextual, predicted importance. This improves perplexity & downstream accuracy by over 8% relative to SoTA methods for estimating token importance. We evaluate TokenButler on a novel synthetic small-context co-referential retrieval task, demonstrating near-oracle accuracy. Code, models and benchmarks: https://github.com/abdelfattah-lab/TokenButler

In the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), considerable attention has been given to the quality of training datasets. However, the role of tokenizers in the LLM training pipeline, particularly for multilingual models, has received less focus. The quality of tokenization can significantly impact a model's ability to handle diverse languages effectively. We introduce Qtok, a tool designed to assess tokenizer quality with a specific emphasis on their performance in multilingual contexts. Our research proposes a set of metrics for evaluating tokenizer quality, including measures of language coverage, token completeness, and distribution across languages and linguistic categories. Qtok applies these metrics to evaluate 13 distinct tokenizers from 58 publicly available models, analyzing their output across different linguistic contexts. Our analysis revealed significant variations in token distribution across languages and categories, highlighting potential biases and areas for improvement in current tokenization strategies. This research contributes to the field of tokenizer evaluation within multilingual LLM development by providing a systematic approach to assessing tokenizer quality. Our findings highlight the critical role of tokenization in multilingual LLM capability. The Qtok tool and our analysis methodology offer practical means for researchers to evaluate and improve tokenization strategies for multilingual applications. We offer a method to compare tokenizer quality across these metrics, which may be useful when selecting or adjusting tokenizers for specific multilingual LLM applications.

We present our shared task on text-based emotion detection, covering more than 30 languages from seven distinct language families. These languages are predominantly low-resource and spoken across various continents. The data instances are multi-labeled into six emotional classes, with additional datasets in 11 languages annotated for emotion intensity. Participants were asked to predict labels in three tracks: (a) emotion labels in monolingual settings, (b) emotion intensity scores, and (c) emotion labels in cross-lingual settings. The task attracted over 700 participants. We received final submissions from more than 200 teams and 93 system description papers. We report baseline results, as well as findings on the best-performing systems, the most common approaches, and the most effective methods across various tracks and languages. The datasets for this task are publicly available.

Social Media platforms have offered invaluable opportunities for linguistic research. The availability of up-to-date data, coming from any part in the world, and coming from natural contexts, has allowed researchers to study language in real time. One of the fields that has made great use of social media platforms is Corpus Linguistics. There is currently a wide range of projects which have been able to successfully create corpora from social media. In this paper, we present the development and deployment of a linguistic corpus from Twitter posts in English, coming from 26 news agencies and 27 individuals. The main goal was to create a fully annotated English corpus for linguistic analysis. We include information on morphology and syntax, as well as NLP features such as tokenization, lemmas, and n- grams. The information is presented through a range of powerful visualisations for users to explore linguistic patterns in the corpus. With this tool, we aim to contribute to the area of language technologies applied to linguistic research.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, excelling in handling longer sequences. However, the inefficiency and redundancy in processing extended in-context tokens remain a challenge. Many attempts to address this rely on compressing tokens with smaller text encoders, yet we question whether text encoders are truly indispensable. Our journey leads to an unexpected discovery-a much smaller vision encoder, applied directly to sequences of text tokens, can rival text encoders on text tasks. When pre-trained on large amounts of data and transferred to multiple mid-sized or small text understanding benchmarks, VIST leads to comparable results with 16% fewer FLOPs and 50% less memory usage. We further uncover significant token redundancy and devise a frequency-based masking strategy to guide the focus of the visual encoder toward the most critical tokens. Interestingly, we observe the trained visual encoder performs like a summarizer, selectively ignoring less important words such as prepositions and conjunctions. This approach delivers remarkable results, outperforming traditional text encoder-based methods by 5.7% on average over benchmarks like TriviaQA, NQ, PopQA, TREF, SST2, and SST5, setting a new standard for token efficiency in LLMs.

Recent advances in image tokenizers, such as VQ-VAE, have enabled text-to-image generation using auto-regressive methods, similar to language modeling. However, these methods have yet to leverage pre-trained language models, despite their adaptability to various downstream tasks. In this work, we explore this gap by adapting a pre-trained language model for auto-regressive text-to-image generation, and find that pre-trained language models offer limited help. We provide a two-fold explanation by analyzing tokens from each modality. First, we demonstrate that image tokens possess significantly different semantics compared to text tokens, rendering pre-trained language models no more effective in modeling them than randomly initialized ones. Second, the text tokens in the image-text datasets are too simple compared to normal language model pre-training data, which causes the catastrophic degradation of language models' capability.

Building effective neural machine translation (NMT) models for very low-resourced and morphologically rich African indigenous languages is an open challenge. Besides the issue of finding available resources for them, a lot of work is put into preprocessing and tokenization. Recent studies have shown that standard tokenization methods do not always adequately deal with the grammatical, diacritical, and tonal properties of some African languages. That, coupled with the extremely low availability of training samples, hinders the production of reliable NMT models. In this paper, using Fon language as a case study, we revisit standard tokenization methods and introduce Word-Expressions-Based (WEB) tokenization, a human-involved super-words tokenization strategy to create a better representative vocabulary for training. Furthermore, we compare our tokenization strategy to others on the Fon-French and French-Fon translation tasks.

Spoken language conveys meaning not only through words but also through intonation, emotion, and emphasis. Sentence stress, the emphasis placed on specific words within a sentence, is crucial for conveying speaker intent and has been extensively studied in linguistics. In this work, we introduce WHISTRESS, an alignment-free approach for enhancing transcription systems with sentence stress detection. To support this task, we propose TINYSTRESS-15K, a scalable, synthetic training data for the task of sentence stress detection which resulted from a fully automated dataset creation process. We train WHISTRESS on TINYSTRESS-15K and evaluate it against several competitive baselines. Our results show that WHISTRESS outperforms existing methods while requiring no additional input priors during training or inference. Notably, despite being trained on synthetic data, WHISTRESS demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization across diverse benchmarks. Project page: https://pages.cs.huji.ac.il/adiyoss-lab/whistress.

Long context inference presents challenges at the system level with increased compute and memory requirements, as well as from an accuracy perspective in being able to reason over long contexts. Recently, several methods have been proposed to compress the prompt to reduce the context length. However, there has been little work on comparing the different proposed methods across different tasks through a standardized analysis. This has led to conflicting results. To address this, here we perform a comprehensive characterization and evaluation of different prompt compression methods. In particular, we analyze extractive compression, summarization-based abstractive compression, and token pruning methods. Surprisingly, we find that extractive compression often outperforms all the other approaches, and enables up to 10x compression with minimal accuracy degradation. Interestingly, we also find that despite several recent claims, token pruning methods often lag behind extractive compression. We only found marginal improvements on summarization tasks.

In this study, we introduce FEET, a standardized protocol designed to guide the development and benchmarking of foundation models. While numerous benchmark datasets exist for evaluating these models, we propose a structured evaluation protocol across three distinct scenarios to gain a comprehensive understanding of their practical performance. We define three primary use cases: frozen embeddings, few-shot embeddings, and fully fine-tuned embeddings. Each scenario is detailed and illustrated through two case studies: one in sentiment analysis and another in the medical domain, demonstrating how these evaluations provide a thorough assessment of foundation models' effectiveness in research applications. We recommend this protocol as a standard for future research aimed at advancing representation learning models.

Building on the foundations of language modeling in natural language processing, Next Token Prediction (NTP) has evolved into a versatile training objective for machine learning tasks across various modalities, achieving considerable success. As Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced to unify understanding and generation tasks within the textual modality, recent research has shown that tasks from different modalities can also be effectively encapsulated within the NTP framework, transforming the multimodal information into tokens and predict the next one given the context. This survey introduces a comprehensive taxonomy that unifies both understanding and generation within multimodal learning through the lens of NTP. The proposed taxonomy covers five key aspects: Multimodal tokenization, MMNTP model architectures, unified task representation, datasets \& evaluation, and open challenges. This new taxonomy aims to aid researchers in their exploration of multimodal intelligence. An associated GitHub repository collecting the latest papers and repos is available at https://github.com/LMM101/Awesome-Multimodal-Next-Token-Prediction

The lack of automatic evaluation metrics tailored for SignWriting presents a significant obstacle in developing effective transcription and translation models for signed languages. This paper introduces a comprehensive suite of evaluation metrics specifically designed for SignWriting, including adaptations of standard metrics such as BLEU and chrF, the application of CLIPScore to SignWriting images, and a novel symbol distance metric unique to our approach. We address the distinct challenges of evaluating single signs versus continuous signing and provide qualitative demonstrations of metric efficacy through score distribution analyses and nearest-neighbor searches within the SignBank corpus. Our findings reveal the strengths and limitations of each metric, offering valuable insights for future advancements using SignWriting. This work contributes essential tools for evaluating SignWriting models, facilitating progress in the field of sign language processing. Our code is available at https://github.com/sign-language-processing/signwriting-evaluation.

We introduce SPIRIT-LM, a foundation multimodal language model that freely mixes text and speech. Our model is based on a pretrained text language model that we extend to the speech modality by continuously training it on text and speech units. Speech and text sequences are concatenated as a single set of tokens, and trained with a word-level interleaving method using a small automatically-curated speech-text parallel corpus. SPIRIT-LM comes in two versions: a BASE version that uses speech semantic units and an EXPRESSIVE version that models expressivity using pitch and style units in addition to the semantic units. For both versions, the text is encoded with subword BPE tokens. The resulting model displays both the semantic abilities of text models and the expressive abilities of speech models. Additionally, we demonstrate that SPIRIT-LM is able to learn new tasks in a few-shot fashion across modalities (i.e. ASR, TTS, Speech Classification).

We propose task-adaptive tokenization as a way to adapt the generation pipeline to the specifics of a downstream task and enhance long-form generation in mental health. Inspired by insights from cognitive science, our task-adaptive tokenizer samples variable segmentations from multiple outcomes, with sampling probabilities optimized based on task-specific data. We introduce a strategy for building a specialized vocabulary and introduce a vocabulary merging protocol that allows for the integration of task-specific tokens into the pre-trained model's tokenization step. Through extensive experiments on psychological question-answering tasks in both Chinese and English, we find that our task-adaptive tokenization approach brings a significant improvement in generation performance while using up to 60% fewer tokens. Preliminary experiments point to promising results when using our tokenization approach with very large language models.

LLMs process text as sequences of tokens that roughly correspond to words, where less common words are represented by multiple tokens. However, individual tokens are often semantically unrelated to the meanings of the words/concepts they comprise. For example, Llama-2-7b's tokenizer splits the word "northeastern" into the tokens ['_n', 'ort', 'he', 'astern'], none of which correspond to semantically meaningful units like "north" or "east." Similarly, the overall meanings of named entities like "Neil Young" and multi-word expressions like "break a leg" cannot be directly inferred from their constituent tokens. Mechanistically, how do LLMs convert such arbitrary groups of tokens into useful higher-level representations? In this work, we find that last token representations of named entities and multi-token words exhibit a pronounced "erasure" effect, where information about previous and current tokens is rapidly forgotten in early layers. Using this observation, we propose a method to "read out" the implicit vocabulary of an autoregressive LLM by examining differences in token representations across layers, and present results of this method for Llama-2-7b and Llama-3-8B. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to probe the implicit vocabulary of an LLM.

We introduce a new dataset for multi-class emotion analysis from long-form narratives in English. The Dataset for Emotions of Narrative Sequences (DENS) was collected from both classic literature available on Project Gutenberg and modern online narratives available on Wattpad, annotated using Amazon Mechanical Turk. A number of statistics and baseline benchmarks are provided for the dataset. Of the tested techniques, we find that the fine-tuning of a pre-trained BERT model achieves the best results, with an average micro-F1 score of 60.4%. Our results show that the dataset provides a novel opportunity in emotion analysis that requires moving beyond existing sentence-level techniques.

Feeling emotion is a critical characteristic to distinguish people from machines. Among all the multi-modal resources for emotion detection, textual datasets are those containing the least additional information in addition to semantics, and hence are adopted widely for testing the developed systems. However, most of the textual emotional datasets consist of emotion labels of only individual words, sentences or documents, which makes it challenging to discuss the contextual flow of emotions. In this paper, we introduce EmotionLines, the first dataset with emotions labeling on all utterances in each dialogue only based on their textual content. Dialogues in EmotionLines are collected from Friends TV scripts and private Facebook messenger dialogues. Then one of seven emotions, six Ekman's basic emotions plus the neutral emotion, is labeled on each utterance by 5 Amazon MTurkers. A total of 29,245 utterances from 2,000 dialogues are labeled in EmotionLines. We also provide several strong baselines for emotion detection models on EmotionLines in this paper.

We present LEMMING, a modular log-linear model that jointly models lemmatization and tagging and supports the integration of arbitrary global features. It is trainable on corpora annotated with gold standard tags and lemmata and does not rely on morphological dictionaries or analyzers. LEMMING sets the new state of the art in token-based statistical lemmatization on six languages; e.g., for Czech lemmatization, we reduce the error by 60%, from 4.05 to 1.58. We also give empirical evidence that jointly modeling morphological tags and lemmata is mutually beneficial.

In this paper, we introduce the first and largest Hindi text corpus, named BHAAV, which means emotions in Hindi, for analyzing emotions that a writer expresses through his characters in a story, as perceived by a narrator/reader. The corpus consists of 20,304 sentences collected from 230 different short stories spanning across 18 genres such as Inspirational and Mystery. Each sentence has been annotated into one of the five emotion categories - anger, joy, suspense, sad, and neutral, by three native Hindi speakers with at least ten years of formal education in Hindi. We also discuss challenges in the annotation of low resource languages such as Hindi, and discuss the scope of the proposed corpus along with its possible uses. We also provide a detailed analysis of the dataset and train strong baseline classifiers reporting their performances.

Subword tokenization schemes are the dominant technique used in current NLP models. However, such schemes can be rigid and tokenizers built on one corpus do not adapt well to other parallel corpora. It has also been observed that in multilingual corpora, subword tokenization schemes over-segment low-resource languages leading to a drop in translation performance. A simple alternative to subword tokenizers is byte-based methods i.e. tokenization into byte sequences using encoding schemes such as UTF-8. Byte tokens often represent inputs at a sub-character granularity i.e. one character can be represented by a sequence of multiple byte tokens. This results in byte sequences that are significantly longer than character sequences. Enforcing aggregation of local information in the lower layers can guide the model to build higher-level semantic information. We propose a Local Byte Fusion (LOBEF) method for byte-based machine translation -- utilizing byte n-gram and word boundaries -- to aggregate local semantic information. Extensive experiments on multilingual translation, zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, and domain adaptation reveal a consistent improvement over traditional byte-based models and even over subword techniques. Further analysis also indicates that our byte-based models are parameter-efficient and can be trained faster than subword models.

We develop a tool that extracts emotions from social media text data. Our methodology has three main advantages. First, it is tailored for financial context; second, it incorporates key aspects of social media data, such as non-standard phrases, emojis and emoticons; and third, it operates by sequentially learning a latent representation that includes features such as word order, word usage, and local context. This tool, along with a user guide is available at: https://github.com/dvamossy/EmTract. Using EmTract, we explore the relationship between investor emotions expressed on social media and asset prices. We document a number of interesting insights. First, we confirm some of the findings of controlled laboratory experiments relating investor emotions to asset price movements. Second, we show that investor emotions are predictive of daily price movements. These impacts are larger when volatility or short interest are higher, and when institutional ownership or liquidity are lower. Third, increased investor enthusiasm prior to the IPO contributes to the large first-day return and long-run underperformance of IPO stocks. To corroborate our results, we provide a number of robustness checks, including using an alternative emotion model. Our findings reinforce the intuition that emotions and market dynamics are closely related, and highlight the importance of considering investor emotions when assessing a stock's short-term value.

Idiomatic expressions have always been a bottleneck for language comprehension and natural language understanding, specifically for tasks like Machine Translation(MT). MT systems predominantly produce literal translations of idiomatic expressions as they do not exhibit generic and linguistically deterministic patterns which can be exploited for comprehension of the non-compositional meaning of the expressions. These expressions occur in parallel corpora used for training, but due to the comparatively high occurrences of the constituent words of idiomatic expressions in literal context, the idiomatic meaning gets overpowered by the compositional meaning of the expression. State of the art Metaphor Detection Systems are able to detect non-compositional usage at word level but miss out on idiosyncratic phrasal idiomatic expressions. This creates a dire need for a dataset with a wider coverage and higher occurrence of commonly occurring idiomatic expressions, the spans of which can be used for Metaphor Detection. With this in mind, we present our English Possible Idiomatic Expressions(EPIE) corpus containing 25206 sentences labelled with lexical instances of 717 idiomatic expressions. These spans also cover literal usages for the given set of idiomatic expressions. We also present the utility of our dataset by using it to train a sequence labelling module and testing on three independent datasets with high accuracy, precision and recall scores.

Despite impressive advancements in multilingual corpora collection and model training, developing large-scale deployments of multilingual models still presents a significant challenge. This is particularly true for language tasks that are culture-dependent. One such example is the area of multilingual sentiment analysis, where affective markers can be subtle and deeply ensconced in culture. This work presents the most extensive open massively multilingual corpus of datasets for training sentiment models. The corpus consists of 79 manually selected datasets from over 350 datasets reported in the scientific literature based on strict quality criteria. The corpus covers 27 languages representing 6 language families. Datasets can be queried using several linguistic and functional features. In addition, we present a multi-faceted sentiment classification benchmark summarizing hundreds of experiments conducted on different base models, training objectives, dataset collections, and fine-tuning strategies.

While tokenization is a key step in language modeling, with effects on model training and performance, it remains unclear how to effectively evaluate tokenizer quality. One proposed dimension of tokenizer quality is the extent to which tokenizers preserve linguistically meaningful subwords, aligning token boundaries with morphological boundaries within a word. We expand MorphScore (Arnett & Bergen, 2025), which previously covered 22 languages, to support a total of 70 languages. The updated MorphScore offers more flexibility in evaluation and addresses some of the limitations of the original version. We then correlate our alignment scores with downstream task performance for five pre-trained languages models on seven tasks, with at least one task in each of the languages in our sample. We find that morphological alignment does not explain very much variance in model performance, suggesting that morphological alignment alone does not measure dimensions of tokenization quality relevant to model performance.

The attention mechanism is a critical component of Large Language Models (LLMs) that allows tokens in a sequence to interact with each other, but is order-invariant. Incorporating position encoding (PE) makes it possible to address by position, such as attending to the i-th token. However, current PE methods use token counts to derive position, and thus cannot generalize to higher levels of abstraction, such as attending to the i-th sentence. In this paper, we propose a new position encoding method, Contextual Position Encoding (CoPE), that allows positions to be conditioned on context by incrementing position only on certain tokens determined by the model. This allows more general position addressing such as attending to the i-th particular word, noun, or sentence. We show that CoPE can solve the selective copy, counting and Flip-Flop tasks where popular position embeddings fail, and improves perplexity on language modeling and coding tasks.

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models rely on encoded prompts to guide the image generation process. Typically, these prompts are extended to a fixed length by adding padding tokens before text encoding. Despite being a default practice, the influence of padding tokens on the image generation process has not been investigated. In this work, we conduct the first in-depth analysis of the role padding tokens play in T2I models. We develop two causal techniques to analyze how information is encoded in the representation of tokens across different components of the T2I pipeline. Using these techniques, we investigate when and how padding tokens impact the image generation process. Our findings reveal three distinct scenarios: padding tokens may affect the model's output during text encoding, during the diffusion process, or be effectively ignored. Moreover, we identify key relationships between these scenarios and the model's architecture (cross or self-attention) and its training process (frozen or trained text encoder). These insights contribute to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of padding tokens, potentially informing future model design and training practices in T2I systems.

Tokenization significantly influences language models(LMs)' performance. This paper traces the evolution of tokenizers from word-level to subword-level, analyzing how they balance tokens and types to enhance model adaptability while controlling complexity. Despite subword tokenizers like Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) overcoming many word tokenizer limitations, they encounter difficulties in handling non-Latin languages and depend heavily on extensive training data and computational resources to grasp the nuances of multiword expressions (MWEs). This article argues that tokenizers, more than mere technical tools, should drawing inspiration from the cognitive science about human language processing. This study then introduces the "Principle of Least Effort" from cognitive science, that humans naturally seek to reduce cognitive effort, and discusses the benefits of this principle for tokenizer development. Based on this principle, the paper proposes that the Less-is-Better (LiB) model could be a new approach for LLM tokenizer. The LiB model can autonomously learn an integrated vocabulary consisting of subwords, words, and MWEs, which effectively reduces both the numbers of tokens and types. Comparative evaluations show that the LiB tokenizer outperforms existing word and BPE tokenizers, presenting an innovative method for tokenizer development, and hinting at the possibility of future cognitive science-based tokenizers being more efficient.

Text animation serves as an expressive medium, transforming static communication into dynamic experiences by infusing words with motion to evoke emotions, emphasize meanings, and construct compelling narratives. Crafting animations that are semantically aware poses significant challenges, demanding expertise in graphic design and animation. We present an automated text animation scheme, termed "Dynamic Typography", which combines two challenging tasks. It deforms letters to convey semantic meaning and infuses them with vibrant movements based on user prompts. Our technique harnesses vector graphics representations and an end-to-end optimization-based framework. This framework employs neural displacement fields to convert letters into base shapes and applies per-frame motion, encouraging coherence with the intended textual concept. Shape preservation techniques and perceptual loss regularization are employed to maintain legibility and structural integrity throughout the animation process. We demonstrate the generalizability of our approach across various text-to-video models and highlight the superiority of our end-to-end methodology over baseline methods, which might comprise separate tasks. Through quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in generating coherent text animations that faithfully interpret user prompts while maintaining readability. Our code is available at: https://animate-your-word.github.io/demo/.

Sentiment is a pervasive feature in natural language text, yet it is an open question how sentiment is represented within Large Language Models (LLMs). In this study, we reveal that across a range of models, sentiment is represented linearly: a single direction in activation space mostly captures the feature across a range of tasks with one extreme for positive and the other for negative. Through causal interventions, we isolate this direction and show it is causally relevant in both toy tasks and real world datasets such as Stanford Sentiment Treebank. Through this case study we model a thorough investigation of what a single direction means on a broad data distribution. We further uncover the mechanisms that involve this direction, highlighting the roles of a small subset of attention heads and neurons. Finally, we discover a phenomenon which we term the summarization motif: sentiment is not solely represented on emotionally charged words, but is additionally summarized at intermediate positions without inherent sentiment, such as punctuation and names. We show that in Stanford Sentiment Treebank zero-shot classification, 76% of above-chance classification accuracy is lost when ablating the sentiment direction, nearly half of which (36%) is due to ablating the summarized sentiment direction exclusively at comma positions.

We present the WASABI Song Corpus, a large corpus of songs enriched with metadata extracted from music databases on the Web, and resulting from the processing of song lyrics and from audio analysis. More specifically, given that lyrics encode an important part of the semantics of a song, we focus here on the description of the methods we proposed to extract relevant information from the lyrics, such as their structure segmentation, their topics, the explicitness of the lyrics content, the salient passages of a song and the emotions conveyed. The creation of the resource is still ongoing: so far, the corpus contains 1.73M songs with lyrics (1.41M unique lyrics) annotated at different levels with the output of the above mentioned methods. Such corpus labels and the provided methods can be exploited by music search engines and music professionals (e.g. journalists, radio presenters) to better handle large collections of lyrics, allowing an intelligent browsing, categorization and segmentation recommendation of songs.

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) has experienced tremendous expansion and diversity due to various shared tasks spanning several languages and fields and organized via SemEval workshops and Germeval. Nonetheless, a few shortcomings still need to be addressed, such as the lack of low-resource language evaluations and the emphasis on sentence-level analysis. To thoroughly assess ABSA techniques in the context of complete reviews, this research presents a novel task, Review-Level Opinion Aspect Sentiment Target (ROAST). ROAST seeks to close the gap between sentence-level and text-level ABSA by identifying every ABSA constituent at the review level. We extend the available datasets to enable ROAST, addressing the drawbacks noted in previous research by incorporating low-resource languages, numerous languages, and a variety of topics. Through this effort, ABSA research will be able to cover more ground and get a deeper comprehension of the task and its practical application in a variety of languages and domains (https://github.com/RiTUAL-UH/ROAST-ABSA).

In this paper, we introduce UniSent universal sentiment lexica for 1000+ languages. Sentiment lexica are vital for sentiment analysis in absence of document-level annotations, a very common scenario for low-resource languages. To the best of our knowledge, UniSent is the largest sentiment resource to date in terms of the number of covered languages, including many low resource ones. In this work, we use a massively parallel Bible corpus to project sentiment information from English to other languages for sentiment analysis on Twitter data. We introduce a method called DomDrift to mitigate the huge domain mismatch between Bible and Twitter by a confidence weighting scheme that uses domain-specific embeddings to compare the nearest neighbors for a candidate sentiment word in the source (Bible) and target (Twitter) domain. We evaluate the quality of UniSent in a subset of languages for which manually created ground truth was available, Macedonian, Czech, German, Spanish, and French. We show that the quality of UniSent is comparable to manually created sentiment resources when it is used as the sentiment seed for the task of word sentiment prediction on top of embedding representations. In addition, we show that emoticon sentiments could be reliably predicted in the Twitter domain using only UniSent and monolingual embeddings in German, Spanish, French, and Italian. With the publication of this paper, we release the UniSent sentiment lexica.

We propose a novel approach for learning interchangeable tokens in language models to obtain an extendable vocabulary that can generalize to new tokens. Our method is designed to address alpha-equivalence, the principle that renaming bound variables in a syntactic expression preserves semantics. This property arises in many formal languages such as temporal logics, in which all proposition symbols represent the same concept but are distinguishable from each other. To handle such tokens, we develop a dual-part embedding approach. The first part is shared across all interchangeable tokens, thereby enforcing that they represent the same core concept. The second part is randomly generated for each token, which enables distinguishability. We evaluate our method in a Transformer encoder-decoder model on two tasks: solving linear temporal logic formulae and copying with extendable vocabulary. Our method demonstrates promising generalization capabilities in addition to introducing a favorable inductive bias for alpha-equivalence.

Pre-tokenization, the initial step in many modern tokenization pipelines, segments text into smaller units called pretokens, typically splitting on whitespace and punctuation. While this process encourages having full, individual words as tokens, it introduces a fundamental limitation in most tokenization algorithms such as Byte Pair Encoding (BPE). Specifically, pre-tokenization causes the distribution of tokens in a corpus to heavily skew towards common, full-length words. This skewed distribution limits the benefits of expanding to larger vocabularies, since the additional tokens appear with progressively lower counts. To overcome this barrier, we propose BoundlessBPE, a modified BPE algorithm that relaxes the pretoken boundary constraint. Our approach selectively merges two complete pretokens into a larger unit we term a superword. Superwords are not necessarily semantically cohesive. For example, the pretokens " of" and " the" might be combined to form the superword " of the". This merging strategy results in a substantially more uniform distribution of tokens across a corpus than standard BPE, and compresses text more effectively, with an approximate 20% increase in bytes per token.

Figurative language is ubiquitous in English. Yet, the vast majority of NLP research focuses on literal language. Existing text representations by design rely on compositionality, while figurative language is often non-compositional. In this paper, we study the interpretation of two non-compositional figurative languages (idioms and similes). We collected datasets of fictional narratives containing a figurative expression along with crowd-sourced plausible and implausible continuations relying on the correct interpretation of the expression. We then trained models to choose or generate the plausible continuation. Our experiments show that models based solely on pre-trained language models perform substantially worse than humans on these tasks. We additionally propose knowledge-enhanced models, adopting human strategies for interpreting figurative language types : inferring meaning from the context and relying on the constituent words' literal meanings. The knowledge-enhanced models improve the performance on both the discriminative and generative tasks, further bridging the gap from human performance.

Most datasets for sentiment analysis lack context in which an opinion was expressed, often crucial for emotion understanding, and are mainly limited by a few emotion categories. Foundation large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 suffer from over-predicting emotions and are too resource-intensive. We design an LLM-based data synthesis pipeline and leverage a large model, Mistral-7b, for the generation of training examples for more accessible, lightweight BERT-type encoder models. We focus on enlarging the semantic diversity of examples and propose grounding the generation into a corpus of narratives to produce non-repetitive story-character-centered utterances with unique contexts over 28 emotion classes. By running 700K inferences in 450 GPU hours, we contribute with the dataset of 100K contextual and also 300K context-less examples to cover both scenarios. We use it for fine-tuning pre-trained encoders, which results in several Emo Pillars models. We show that Emo Pillars models are highly adaptive to new domains when tuned to specific tasks such as GoEmotions, ISEAR, IEMOCAP, and EmoContext, reaching the SOTA performance on the first three. We also validate our dataset, conducting statistical analysis and human evaluation, and confirm the success of our measures in utterance diversification (although less for the neutral class) and context personalization, while pointing out the need for improved handling of out-of-taxonomy labels within the pipeline.

To better support retrieval applications such as web search and question answering, growing effort is made to develop retrieval-oriented language models. Most of the existing works focus on improving the semantic representation capability for the contextualized embedding of [CLS] token. However, recent study shows that the ordinary tokens besides [CLS] may provide extra information, which helps to produce a better representation effect. As such, it's necessary to extend the current methods where all contextualized embeddings can be jointly pre-trained for the retrieval tasks. With this motivation, we propose a new pre-training method: duplex masked auto-encoder, a.k.a. DupMAE, which targets on improving the semantic representation capacity for the contextualized embeddings of both [CLS] and ordinary tokens. It introduces two decoding tasks: one is to reconstruct the original input sentence based on the [CLS] embedding, the other one is to minimize the bag-of-words loss (BoW) about the input sentence based on the entire ordinary tokens' embeddings. The two decoding losses are added up to train a unified encoding model. The embeddings from [CLS] and ordinary tokens, after dimension reduction and aggregation, are concatenated as one unified semantic representation for the input. DupMAE is simple but empirically competitive: with a small decoding cost, it substantially contributes to the model's representation capability and transferability, where remarkable improvements are achieved on MS MARCO and BEIR benchmarks.

We present the Knesset Corpus, a corpus of Hebrew parliamentary proceedings containing over 30 million sentences (over 384 million tokens) from all the (plenary and committee) protocols held in the Israeli parliament between 1998 and 2022. Sentences are annotated with morpho-syntactic information and are associated with detailed meta-information reflecting demographic and political properties of the speakers, based on a large database of parliament members and factions that we compiled. We discuss the structure and composition of the corpus and the various processing steps we applied to it. To demonstrate the utility of this novel dataset we present two use cases. We show that the corpus can be used to examine historical developments in the style of political discussions by showing a reduction in lexical richness in the proceedings over time. We also investigate some differences between the styles of men and women speakers. These use cases exemplify the potential of the corpus to shed light on important trends in the Israeli society, supporting research in linguistics, political science, communication, law, etc.

The rapid expansion of the digital world has propelled sentiment analysis into a critical tool across diverse sectors such as marketing, politics, customer service, and healthcare. While there have been significant advancements in sentiment analysis for widely spoken languages, low-resource languages, such as Bangla, remain largely under-researched due to resource constraints. Furthermore, the recent unprecedented performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in various applications highlights the need to evaluate them in the context of low-resource languages. In this study, we present a sizeable manually annotated dataset encompassing 33,605 Bangla news tweets and Facebook comments. We also investigate zero- and few-shot in-context learning with several language models, including Flan-T5, GPT-4, and Bloomz, offering a comparative analysis against fine-tuned models. Our findings suggest that monolingual transformer-based models consistently outperform other models, even in zero and few-shot scenarios. To foster continued exploration, we intend to make this dataset and our research tools publicly available to the broader research community. In the spirit of further research, we plan to make this dataset and our experimental resources publicly accessible to the wider research community.

In recent years, language models have become increasingly larger and more complex. However, the input representations for these models continue to rely on simple and greedy subword tokenization methods. In this paper, we propose a novel tokenization method that factorizes subwords onto discrete triplets using a VQ-VAE model. The effectiveness of the proposed tokenization method, referred to as the Factorizer, is evaluated on language modeling and morpho-syntactic tasks for 7 diverse languages. Results indicate that this method is more appropriate and robust for morphological tasks than the commonly used byte-pair encoding (BPE) tokenization algorithm.

General-purpose sentence embedding models often struggle to capture specialized financial semantics, especially in low-resource languages like Korean, due to domain-specific jargon, temporal meaning shifts, and misaligned bilingual vocabularies. To address these gaps, we introduce NMIXX (Neural eMbeddings for Cross-lingual eXploration of Finance), a suite of cross-lingual embedding models fine-tuned with 18.8K high-confidence triplets that pair in-domain paraphrases, hard negatives derived from a semantic-shift typology, and exact Korean-English translations. Concurrently, we release KorFinSTS, a 1,921-pair Korean financial STS benchmark spanning news, disclosures, research reports, and regulations, designed to expose nuances that general benchmarks miss. When evaluated against seven open-license baselines, NMIXX's multilingual bge-m3 variant achieves Spearman's rho gains of +0.10 on English FinSTS and +0.22 on KorFinSTS, outperforming its pre-adaptation checkpoint and surpassing other models by the largest margin, while revealing a modest trade-off in general STS performance. Our analysis further shows that models with richer Korean token coverage adapt more effectively, underscoring the importance of tokenizer design in low-resource, cross-lingual settings. By making both models and the benchmark publicly available, we provide the community with robust tools for domain-adapted, multilingual representation learning in finance.

We present a novel approach to data preparation for developing multilingual Indic large language model. Our meticulous data acquisition spans open-source and proprietary sources, including Common Crawl, Indic books, news articles, and Wikipedia, ensuring a diverse and rich linguistic representation. For each Indic language, we design a custom preprocessing pipeline to effectively eliminate redundant and low-quality text content. Additionally, we perform deduplication on Common Crawl data to address the redundancy present in 70% of the crawled web pages. This study focuses on developing high-quality data, optimizing tokenization for our multilingual dataset for Indic large language models with 3B and 7B parameters, engineered for superior performance in Indic languages. We introduce a novel multilingual tokenizer training strategy, demonstrating our custom-trained Indic tokenizer outperforms the state-of-the-art OpenAI Tiktoken tokenizer, achieving a superior token-to-word ratio for Indic languages.

The disconnect between tokenizer creation and model training in language models has been known to allow for certain inputs, such as the infamous SolidGoldMagikarp token, to induce unwanted behaviour. Although such `glitch tokens' that are present in the tokenizer vocabulary, but are nearly or fully absent in training, have been observed across a variety of different models, a consistent way of identifying them has been missing. We present a comprehensive analysis of Large Language Model (LLM) tokenizers, specifically targeting this issue of detecting untrained and under-trained tokens. Through a combination of tokenizer analysis, model weight-based indicators, and prompting techniques, we develop effective methods for automatically detecting these problematic tokens. Our findings demonstrate the prevalence of such tokens across various models and provide insights into improving the efficiency and safety of language models.

In the absence of nonverbal cues during messaging communication, users express part of their emotions using emojis. Thus, having emojis in the vocabulary of text messaging language models can significantly improve many natural language processing (NLP) applications such as online communication analysis. On the other hand, word embedding models are usually trained on a very large corpus of text such as Wikipedia or Google News datasets that include very few samples with emojis. In this study, we create emojiSpace, which is a combined word-emoji embedding using the word2vec model from the Genism library in Python. We trained emojiSpace on a corpus of more than 4 billion tweets and evaluated it by implementing sentiment analysis on a Twitter dataset containing more than 67 million tweets as an extrinsic task. For this task, we compared the performance of two different classifiers of random forest (RF) and linear support vector machine (SVM). For evaluation, we compared emojiSpace performance with two other pre-trained embeddings and demonstrated that emojiSpace outperforms both.

Texts can convey several types of inter-related information concerning opinions and attitudes. Such information includes the author's attitude towards mentioned entities, attitudes of the entities towards each other, positive and negative effects on the entities in the described situations. In this paper, we described the lexicon RuSentiFrames for Russian, where predicate words and expressions are collected and linked to so-called sentiment frames conveying several types of presupposed information on attitudes and effects. We applied the created frames in the task of extracting attitudes from a large news collection.

Human communication is inherently multimodal and asynchronous. Analyzing human emotions and sentiment is an emerging field of artificial intelligence. We are witnessing an increasing amount of multimodal content in local languages on social media about products and other topics. However, there are not many multimodal resources available for under-resourced Dravidian languages. Our study aims to create a multimodal sentiment analysis dataset for the under-resourced Tamil and Malayalam languages. First, we downloaded product or movies review videos from YouTube for Tamil and Malayalam. Next, we created captions for the videos with the help of annotators. Then we labelled the videos for sentiment, and verified the inter-annotator agreement using Fleiss's Kappa. This is the first multimodal sentiment analysis dataset for Tamil and Malayalam by volunteer annotators.

People often utilise online media (e.g., Facebook, Reddit) as a platform to express their psychological distress and seek support. State-of-the-art NLP techniques demonstrate strong potential to automatically detect mental health issues from text. Research suggests that mental health issues are reflected in emotions (e.g., sadness) indicated in a person's choice of language. Therefore, we developed a novel emotion-annotated mental health corpus (EmoMent), consisting of 2802 Facebook posts (14845 sentences) extracted from two South Asian countries - Sri Lanka and India. Three clinical psychology postgraduates were involved in annotating these posts into eight categories, including 'mental illness' (e.g., depression) and emotions (e.g., 'sadness', 'anger'). EmoMent corpus achieved 'very good' inter-annotator agreement of 98.3% (i.e. % with two or more agreement) and Fleiss' Kappa of 0.82. Our RoBERTa based models achieved an F1 score of 0.76 and a macro-averaged F1 score of 0.77 for the first task (i.e. predicting a mental health condition from a post) and the second task (i.e. extent of association of relevant posts with the categories defined in our taxonomy), respectively.

Technological advancements in web platforms allow people to express and share emotions towards textual write-ups written and shared by others. This brings about different interesting domains for analysis; emotion expressed by the writer and emotion elicited from the readers. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for Readers' Emotion Detection from short-text documents using a deep learning model called REDAffectiveLM. Within state-of-the-art NLP tasks, it is well understood that utilizing context-specific representations from transformer-based pre-trained language models helps achieve improved performance. Within this affective computing task, we explore how incorporating affective information can further enhance performance. Towards this, we leverage context-specific and affect enriched representations by using a transformer-based pre-trained language model in tandem with affect enriched Bi-LSTM+Attention. For empirical evaluation, we procure a new dataset REN-20k, besides using RENh-4k and SemEval-2007. We evaluate the performance of our REDAffectiveLM rigorously across these datasets, against a vast set of state-of-the-art baselines, where our model consistently outperforms baselines and obtains statistically significant results. Our results establish that utilizing affect enriched representation along with context-specific representation within a neural architecture can considerably enhance readers' emotion detection. Since the impact of affect enrichment specifically in readers' emotion detection isn't well explored, we conduct a detailed analysis over affect enriched Bi-LSTM+Attention using qualitative and quantitative model behavior evaluation techniques. We observe that compared to conventional semantic embedding, affect enriched embedding increases ability of the network to effectively identify and assign weightage to key terms responsible for readers' emotion detection.

This paper introduces the "CIVICS: Culturally-Informed & Values-Inclusive Corpus for Societal impacts" dataset, designed to evaluate the social and cultural variation of Large Language Models (LLMs) across multiple languages and value-sensitive topics. We create a hand-crafted, multilingual dataset of value-laden prompts which address specific socially sensitive topics, including LGBTQI rights, social welfare, immigration, disability rights, and surrogacy. CIVICS is designed to generate responses showing LLMs' encoded and implicit values. Through our dynamic annotation processes, tailored prompt design, and experiments, we investigate how open-weight LLMs respond to value-sensitive issues, exploring their behavior across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. Using two experimental set-ups based on log-probabilities and long-form responses, we show social and cultural variability across different LLMs. Specifically, experiments involving long-form responses demonstrate that refusals are triggered disparately across models, but consistently and more frequently in English or translated statements. Moreover, specific topics and sources lead to more pronounced differences across model answers, particularly on immigration, LGBTQI rights, and social welfare. As shown by our experiments, the CIVICS dataset aims to serve as a tool for future research, promoting reproducibility and transparency across broader linguistic settings, and furthering the development of AI technologies that respect and reflect global cultural diversities and value pluralism. The CIVICS dataset and tools will be made available upon publication under open licenses; an anonymized version is currently available at https://huggingface.co/CIVICS-dataset.

Temporal and numerical expression understanding is of great importance in many downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. However, much previous work covers only a few sub-types and focuses only on entity extraction, which severely limits the usability of identified mentions. In order for such entities to be useful in downstream scenarios, coverage and granularity of sub-types are important; and, even more so, providing resolution into concrete values that can be manipulated. Furthermore, most previous work addresses only a handful of languages. Here we describe a multi-lingual evaluation dataset - NTX - covering diverse temporal and numerical expressions across 14 languages and covering extraction, normalization, and resolution. Along with the dataset we provide a robust rule-based system as a strong baseline for comparisons against other models to be evaluated in this dataset. Data and code are available at https://aka.ms/NTX.

Lately, propelled by the phenomenal advances around the transformer architecture, the legal NLP field has enjoyed spectacular growth. To measure progress, well curated and challenging benchmarks are crucial. However, most benchmarks are English only and in legal NLP specifically there is no multilingual benchmark available yet. Additionally, many benchmarks are saturated, with the best models clearly outperforming the best humans and achieving near perfect scores. We survey the legal NLP literature and select 11 datasets covering 24 languages, creating LEXTREME. To provide a fair comparison, we propose two aggregate scores, one based on the datasets and one on the languages. The best baseline (XLM-R large) achieves both a dataset aggregate score a language aggregate score of 61.3. This indicates that LEXTREME is still very challenging and leaves ample room for improvement. To make it easy for researchers and practitioners to use, we release LEXTREME on huggingface together with all the code required to evaluate models and a public Weights and Biases project with all the runs.

Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems augment how knowledge language models are by integrating external information sources such as Wikipedia, internal documents, scientific papers, or the open internet. RAG systems that rely on the open internet as their knowledge source have to contend with the complexities of human-generated content. Human communication extends much deeper than just the words rendered as text. Intent, tonality, and connotation can all change the meaning of what is being conveyed. Recent real-world deployments of RAG systems have shown some difficulty in understanding these nuances of human communication. One significant challenge for these systems lies in processing sarcasm. Though the Large Language Models (LLMs) that make up the backbone of these RAG systems are able to detect sarcasm, they currently do not always use these detections for the subsequent processing of text. To address these issues, in this paper, we synthetically generate sarcastic passages from Natural Question's Wikipedia retrieval corpus. We then test the impact of these passages on the performance of both the retriever and reader portion of the RAG pipeline. We introduce a prompting system designed to enhance the model's ability to interpret and generate responses in the presence of sarcasm, thus improving overall system performance. Finally, we conduct ablation studies to validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating improvements in handling sarcastic content within RAG systems.

Shannon, in his seminal paper introducing information theory, divided the communication into three levels: technical, semantic, and effectivenss. While the technical level is concerned with accurate reconstruction of transmitted symbols, the semantic and effectiveness levels deal with the inferred meaning and its effect on the receiver. Thanks to telecommunications, the first level problem has produced great advances like the internet. Large Language Models (LLMs) make some progress towards the second goal, but the third level still remains largely untouched. The third problem deals with predicting and optimizing communication for desired receiver behavior. LLMs, while showing wide generalization capabilities across a wide range of tasks, are unable to solve for this. One reason for the underperformance could be a lack of "behavior tokens" in LLMs' training corpora. Behavior tokens define receiver behavior over a communication, such as shares, likes, clicks, purchases, retweets, etc. While preprocessing data for LLM training, behavior tokens are often removed from the corpora as noise. Therefore, in this paper, we make some initial progress towards reintroducing behavior tokens in LLM training. The trained models, other than showing similar performance to LLMs on content understanding tasks, show generalization capabilities on behavior simulation, content simulation, behavior understanding, and behavior domain adaptation. Using a wide range of tasks on two corpora, we show results on all these capabilities. We call these models Large Content and Behavior Models (LCBMs). Further, to spur more research on LCBMs, we release our new Content Behavior Corpus (CBC), a repository containing communicator, message, and corresponding receiver behavior.

Word emphasis in textual content aims at conveying the desired intention by changing the size, color, typeface, style (bold, italic, etc.), and other typographical features. The emphasized words are extremely helpful in drawing the readers' attention to specific information that the authors wish to emphasize. However, performing such emphasis using a soft keyboard for social media interactions is time-consuming and has an associated learning curve. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to automate the emphasis word detection on short written texts. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first lightweight deep learning approach for smartphone deployment of emphasis selection. Experimental results show that our approach achieves comparable accuracy at a much lower model size than existing models. Our best lightweight model has a memory footprint of 2.82 MB with a matching score of 0.716 on SemEval-2020 public benchmark dataset.

Understanding the locus of semantic representation in large language models (LLMs) is crucial for interpretability and architectural innovation. The dominant paradigm posits that trainable input embeddings serve as foundational "meaning vectors." This paper challenges that view. We construct Transformer models where the embedding layer is entirely frozen, with vectors derived not from data, but from the visual structure of Unicode glyphs. These non-semantic, precomputed visual embeddings are fixed throughout training. Our method is compatible with any tokenizer, including a novel Unicode-centric tokenizer we introduce to ensure universal text coverage. Despite the absence of trainable, semantically initialized embeddings, our models converge, generate coherent text, and, critically, outperform architecturally identical models with trainable embeddings on the MMLU reasoning benchmark. We attribute this to "representational interference" in conventional models, where the embedding layer is burdened with learning both structural and semantic features. Our results indicate that high-level semantics are not inherent to input embeddings but are an emergent property of the Transformer's compositional architecture and data scale. This reframes the role of embeddings from meaning containers to structural primitives. We release all code and models to foster further research.

The continuous and increasing use of social media has enabled the expression of human thoughts, opinions, and everyday actions publicly at an unprecedented scale. We present the Vent dataset, the largest annotated dataset of text, emotions, and social connections to date. It comprises more than 33 millions of posts by nearly a million of users together with their social connections. Each post has an associated emotion. There are 705 different emotions, organized in 63 "emotion categories", forming a two-level taxonomy of affects. Our initial statistical analysis describes the global patterns of activity in the Vent platform, revealing large heterogenities and certain remarkable regularities regarding the use of the different emotions. We focus on the aggregated use of emotions, the temporal activity, and the social network of users, and outline possible methods to infer emotion networks based on the user activity. We also analyze the text and describe the affective landscape of Vent, finding agreements with existing (small scale) annotated corpus in terms of emotion categories and positive/negative valences. Finally, we discuss possible research questions that can be addressed from this unique dataset.

Recent advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have seen Large-scale Language Models (LLMs) excel at producing high-quality text for various purposes. Notably, in Text-To-Speech (TTS) systems, the integration of BERT for semantic token generation has underscored the importance of semantic content in producing coherent speech outputs. Despite this, the specific utility of LLMs in enhancing TTS synthesis remains considerably limited. This research introduces an innovative approach, Llama-VITS, which enhances TTS synthesis by enriching the semantic content of text using LLM. Llama-VITS integrates semantic embeddings from Llama2 with the VITS model, a leading end-to-end TTS framework. By leveraging Llama2 for the primary speech synthesis process, our experiments demonstrate that Llama-VITS matches the naturalness of the original VITS (ORI-VITS) and those incorporate BERT (BERT-VITS), on the LJSpeech dataset, a substantial collection of neutral, clear speech. Moreover, our method significantly enhances emotive expressiveness on the EmoV_DB_bea_sem dataset, a curated selection of emotionally consistent speech from the EmoV_DB dataset, highlighting its potential to generate emotive speech.

Token embeddings, a mapping from discrete lexical symbols to continuous vectors, are at the heart of any language model (LM). However, lexical symbol meanings can also be determined and even redefined by their structural role in a long context. In this paper, we ask: is it possible for a language model to be performant without any fixed token embeddings? Such a language model would have to rely entirely on the co-occurence and repetition of tokens in the context rather than the a priori identity of any token. To answer this, we study lexinvariantlanguage models that are invariant to lexical symbols and therefore do not need fixed token embeddings in practice. First, we prove that we can construct a lexinvariant LM to converge to the true language model at a uniform rate that is polynomial in terms of the context length, with a constant factor that is sublinear in the vocabulary size. Second, to build a lexinvariant LM, we simply encode tokens using random Gaussian vectors, such that each token maps to the same representation within each sequence but different representations across sequences. Empirically, we demonstrate that it can indeed attain perplexity comparable to that of a standard language model, given a sufficiently long context. We further explore two properties of the lexinvariant language models: First, given text generated from a substitution cipher of English, it implicitly implements Bayesian in-context deciphering and infers the mapping to the underlying real tokens with high accuracy. Second, it has on average 4X better accuracy over synthetic in-context reasoning tasks. Finally, we discuss regularizing standard language models towards lexinvariance and potential practical applications.

NLP tasks are often limited by scarcity of manually annotated data. In social media sentiment analysis and related tasks, researchers have therefore used binarized emoticons and specific hashtags as forms of distant supervision. Our paper shows that by extending the distant supervision to a more diverse set of noisy labels, the models can learn richer representations. Through emoji prediction on a dataset of 1246 million tweets containing one of 64 common emojis we obtain state-of-the-art performance on 8 benchmark datasets within sentiment, emotion and sarcasm detection using a single pretrained model. Our analyses confirm that the diversity of our emotional labels yield a performance improvement over previous distant supervision approaches.

This work investigates the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in detecting and understanding human emotions through text. Drawing upon emotion models from psychology, we adopt an interdisciplinary perspective that integrates computational and affective sciences insights. The main goal is to assess how accurately they can identify emotions expressed in textual interactions and compare different models on this specific task. This research contributes to broader efforts to enhance human-computer interaction, making artificial intelligence technologies more responsive and sensitive to users' emotional nuances. By employing a methodology that involves comparisons with a state-of-the-art model on the GoEmotions dataset, we aim to gauge LLMs' effectiveness as a system for emotional analysis, paving the way for potential applications in various fields that require a nuanced understanding of human language.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) that use subword tokenization schemes can succeed at a variety of language tasks that require character-level information, despite lacking explicit access to the character composition of tokens. Here, studying a range of models (e.g., GPT- J, BERT, RoBERTa, GloVe), we probe what word pieces encode about character-level information by training classifiers to predict the presence or absence of a particular alphabetical character in a token, based on its embedding (e.g., probing whether the model embedding for "cat" encodes that it contains the character "a"). We find that these models robustly encode character-level information and, in general, larger models perform better at the task. We show that these results generalize to characters from non-Latin alphabets (Arabic, Devanagari, and Cyrillic). Then, through a series of experiments and analyses, we investigate the mechanisms through which PLMs acquire English-language character information during training and argue that this knowledge is acquired through multiple phenomena, including a systematic relationship between particular characters and particular parts of speech, as well as natural variability in the tokenization of related strings.

Recent developments in generative AI have shone a spotlight on high-performance synthetic text generation technologies. The now wide availability and ease of use of such models highlights the urgent need to provide equally powerful technologies capable of identifying synthetic text. With this in mind, we draw inspiration from psychological studies which suggest that people can be driven by emotion and encode emotion in the text they compose. We hypothesize that pretrained language models (PLMs) have an affective deficit because they lack such an emotional driver when generating text and consequently may generate synthetic text which has affective incoherence i.e. lacking the kind of emotional coherence present in human-authored text. We subsequently develop an emotionally aware detector by fine-tuning a PLM on emotion. Experiment results indicate that our emotionally-aware detector achieves improvements across a range of synthetic text generators, various sized models, datasets, and domains. Finally, we compare our emotionally-aware synthetic text detector to ChatGPT in the task of identification of its own output and show substantial gains, reinforcing the potential of emotion as a signal to identify synthetic text. Code, models, and datasets are available at https: //github.com/alanagiasi/emoPLMsynth

With the rapid development of the internet, online social media welcomes people with different backgrounds through its diverse content. The increasing usage of emoji becomes a noticeable trend thanks to emoji's rich information beyond cultural or linguistic borders. However, the current study on emojis is limited to single emoji prediction and there are limited data resources available for further study of the interesting linguistic phenomenon. To this end, we synthesize a large text-emoji parallel corpus, Text2Emoji, from a large language model. Based on the parallel corpus, we distill a sequence-to-sequence model, EmojiLM, which is specialized in the text-emoji bidirectional translation. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks and human evaluation demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms strong baselines and the parallel corpus benefits emoji-related downstream tasks.

We present xGen-MM-Vid (BLIP-3-Video): a multimodal language model for videos, particularly designed to efficiently capture temporal information over multiple frames. BLIP-3-Video takes advantage of the 'temporal encoder' in addition to the conventional visual tokenizer, which maps a sequence of tokens over multiple frames into a compact set of visual tokens. This enables BLIP3-Video to use much fewer visual tokens than its competing models (e.g., 32 vs. 4608 tokens). We explore different types of temporal encoders, including learnable spatio-temporal pooling as well as sequential models like Token Turing Machines. We experimentally confirm that BLIP-3-Video obtains video question-answering accuracies comparable to much larger state-of-the-art models (e.g., 34B), while being much smaller (i.e., 4B) and more efficient by using fewer visual tokens. The project website is at https://www.salesforceairesearch.com/opensource/xGen-MM-Vid/index.html

We extract mathematical concepts from mathematical text using generative large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, contributing to the field of automatic term extraction (ATE) and mathematical text processing, and also to the study of LLMs themselves. Our work builds on that of others in that we aim for automatic extraction of terms (keywords) in one mathematical field, category theory, using as a corpus the 755 abstracts from a snapshot of the online journal "Theory and Applications of Categories", circa 2020. Where our study diverges from previous work is in (1) providing a more thorough analysis of what makes mathematical term extraction a difficult problem to begin with; (2) paying close attention to inter-annotator disagreements; (3) providing a set of guidelines which both human and machine annotators could use to standardize the extraction process; (4) introducing a new annotation tool to help humans with ATE, applicable to any mathematical field and even beyond mathematics; (5) using prompts to ChatGPT as part of the extraction process, and proposing best practices for such prompts; and (6) raising the question of whether ChatGPT could be used as an annotator on the same level as human experts. Our overall findings are that the matter of mathematical ATE is an interesting field which can benefit from participation by LLMs, but LLMs themselves cannot at this time surpass human performance on it.

Mathematical symbols and descriptions appear in various forms across document section boundaries without explicit markup. In this paper, we present a new large-scale dataset that emphasizes extracting symbols and descriptions in scientific documents. Symlink annotates scientific papers of 5 different domains (i.e., computer science, biology, physics, mathematics, and economics). Our experiments on Symlink demonstrate the challenges of the symbol-description linking task for existing models and call for further research effort in this area. We will publicly release Symlink to facilitate future research.

In this paper, we address the persistent challenges that figurative language expressions pose for natural language processing (NLP) systems, particularly in low-resource languages such as Konkani. We present a hybrid model that integrates a pre-trained Multilingual BERT (mBERT) with a bidirectional LSTM and a linear classifier. This architecture is fine-tuned on a newly introduced annotated dataset for metaphor classification, developed as part of this work. To improve the model's efficiency, we implement a gradient-based attention head pruning strategy. For metaphor classification, the pruned model achieves an accuracy of 78%. We also applied our pruning approach to expand on an existing idiom classification task, achieving 83% accuracy. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of attention head pruning for building efficient NLP tools in underrepresented languages.

Offensive language detection has been well studied in many languages, but it is lagging behind in low-resource languages, such as Hebrew. In this paper, we present a new offensive language corpus in Hebrew. A total of 15,881 tweets were retrieved from Twitter. Each was labeled with one or more of five classes (abusive, hate, violence, pornographic, or none offensive) by Arabic-Hebrew bilingual speakers. The annotation process was challenging as each annotator is expected to be familiar with the Israeli culture, politics, and practices to understand the context of each tweet. We fine-tuned two Hebrew BERT models, HeBERT and AlephBERT, using our proposed dataset and another published dataset. We observed that our data boosts HeBERT performance by 2% when combined with D_OLaH. Fine-tuning AlephBERT on our data and testing on D_OLaH yields 69% accuracy, while fine-tuning on D_OLaH and testing on our data yields 57% accuracy, which may be an indication to the generalizability our data offers. Our dataset and fine-tuned models are available on GitHub and Huggingface.

The increasing capability and widespread usage of large language models (LLMs) highlight the desirability of automatic detection of LLM-generated text. Zero-shot detectors, due to their training-free nature, have received considerable attention and notable success. In this paper, we identify a new feature, token cohesiveness, that is useful for zero-shot detection, and we demonstrate that LLM-generated text tends to exhibit higher token cohesiveness than human-written text. Based on this observation, we devise TOCSIN, a generic dual-channel detection paradigm that uses token cohesiveness as a plug-and-play module to improve existing zero-shot detectors. To calculate token cohesiveness, TOCSIN only requires a few rounds of random token deletion and semantic difference measurement, making it particularly suitable for a practical black-box setting where the source model used for generation is not accessible. Extensive experiments with four state-of-the-art base detectors on various datasets, source models, and evaluation settings demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of the proposed approach. Code available at: https://github.com/Shixuan-Ma/TOCSIN.

There has been an increasing research interest in developing specialized dialogue systems that can offer mental health support. However, gathering large-scale and real-life multi-turn conversations for mental health support poses challenges due to the sensitivity of personal information, as well as the time and cost involved. To address these issues, we introduce the SMILE approach, an inclusive language expansion technique that employs ChatGPT to extend public single-turn dialogues into multi-turn ones. Our research first presents a preliminary exploratory study that validates the effectiveness of the SMILE approach. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive and systematic contrastive analysis of datasets generated with and without the SMILE approach, demonstrating that the SMILE method results in a large-scale, diverse, and close-to-real-life multi-turn mental health support conversation corpus, including dialog topics, lexical and semantic features. Finally, we use the collected corpus (SMILECHAT) to develop a more effective dialogue system that offers emotional support and constructive suggestions in multi-turn conversations for mental health support.

A challenge towards developing NLP systems for the world's languages is understanding how they generalize to typological differences relevant for real-world applications. To this end, we propose M2C, a morphologically-aware framework for behavioral testing of NLP models. We use M2C to generate tests that probe models' behavior in light of specific linguistic features in 12 typologically diverse languages. We evaluate state-of-the-art language models on the generated tests. While models excel at most tests in English, we highlight generalization failures to specific typological characteristics such as temporal expressions in Swahili and compounding possessives in Finish. Our findings motivate the development of models that address these blind spots.

We present a novel approach to feature labeling using gradient descent in token-space. While existing methods typically use language models to generate hypotheses about feature meanings, our method directly optimizes label representations by using a language model as a discriminator to predict feature activations. We formulate this as a multi-objective optimization problem in token-space, balancing prediction accuracy, entropy minimization, and linguistic naturalness. Our proof-of-concept experiments demonstrate successful convergence to interpretable single-token labels across diverse domains, including features for detecting animals, mammals, Chinese text, and numbers. Although our current implementation is constrained to single-token labels and relatively simple features, the results suggest that token-space gradient descent could become a valuable addition to the interpretability researcher's toolkit.

Stickers are increasingly used in social media to express sentiment and intent. When finding typing troublesome, people often use a sticker instead. Despite the significant impact of stickers on sentiment analysis and intent recognition, little research has been conducted. To address this gap, we propose a new task: Multimodal chat Sentiment Analysis and Intent Recognition involving Stickers (MSAIRS). Additionally, we introduce a novel multimodal dataset containing Chinese chat records and stickers excerpted from several mainstream social media platforms. Our dataset includes paired data with the same text but different stickers, and various stickers consisting of the same images with different texts, allowing us to better understand the impact of stickers on chat sentiment and intent. We also propose an effective multimodal joint model, MMSAIR, for our task, which is validated on our datasets and indicates that visual information of stickers counts. Our dataset and code will be publicly available.

The wealth of text data generated by social media has enabled new kinds of analysis of emotions with language models. These models are often trained on small and costly datasets of text annotations produced by readers who guess the emotions expressed by others in social media posts. This affects the quality of emotion identification methods due to training data size limitations and noise in the production of labels used in model development. We present LEIA, a model for emotion identification in text that has been trained on a dataset of more than 6 million posts with self-annotated emotion labels for happiness, affection, sadness, anger, and fear. LEIA is based on a word masking method that enhances the learning of emotion words during model pre-training. LEIA achieves macro-F1 values of approximately 73 on three in-domain test datasets, outperforming other supervised and unsupervised methods in a strong benchmark that shows that LEIA generalizes across posts, users, and time periods. We further perform an out-of-domain evaluation on five different datasets of social media and other sources, showing LEIA's robust performance across media, data collection methods, and annotation schemes. Our results show that LEIA generalizes its classification of anger, happiness, and sadness beyond the domain it was trained on. LEIA can be applied in future research to provide better identification of emotions in text from the perspective of the writer. The models produced for this article are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/LEIA

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 <UNK> 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 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 leads to more equitable token counts across languages, with negligible impact on global compression rate and no substantial effect on language-model performance in downstream tasks.

It is known that human speech and certain animal vocalizations can convey meaningful content because we can decipher the content that a given utterance does convey. This paper explores an alternative approach to determining whether a signal is meaningful, one that analyzes only the signal itself and is independent of what the conveyed meaning might be. We devise a method that takes a waveform as input and outputs a score indicating its degree of `meaningfulness`. We cluster contiguous portions of the input to minimize the total description length, and then take the length of the code of the assigned cluster labels as meaningfulness score. We evaluate our method empirically, against several baselines, and show that it is the only one to give a high score to human speech in various languages and with various speakers, a moderate score to animal vocalizations from birds and orcas, and a low score to ambient noise from various sources.

We introduce a corpus of 7,032 sentences rated by human annotators for formality, informativeness, and implicature on a 1-7 scale. The corpus was annotated using Amazon Mechanical Turk. Reliability in the obtained judgments was examined by comparing mean ratings across two MTurk experiments, and correlation with pilot annotations (on sentence formality) conducted in a more controlled setting. Despite the subjectivity and inherent difficulty of the annotation task, correlations between mean ratings were quite encouraging, especially on formality and informativeness. We further explored correlation between the three linguistic variables, genre-wise variation of ratings and correlations within genres, compatibility with automatic stylistic scoring, and sentential make-up of a document in terms of style. To date, our corpus is the largest sentence-level annotated corpus released for formality, informativeness, and implicature.

Understanding how people of various demographics think, feel, and express themselves (collectively called group expression) is essential for social science and underlies the assessment of bias in Large Language Models (LLMs). While LLMs can effectively summarize group expression when provided with empirical examples, coming up with generalizable theories of how a group's expression manifests in real-world text is challenging. In this paper, we define a new task called Group Theorization, in which a system must write theories that differentiate expression across demographic groups. We make available a large dataset on this task, Splits!, constructed by splitting Reddit posts by neutral topics (e.g. sports, cooking, and movies) and by demographics (e.g. occupation, religion, and race). Finally, we suggest a simple evaluation framework for assessing how effectively a method can generate 'better' theories about group expression, backed by human validation. We publicly release the raw corpora and evaluation scripts for Splits! to help researchers assess how methods infer--and potentially misrepresent--group differences in expression. We make Splits! and our evaluation module available at https://github.com/eyloncaplan/splits.

Sentiment Analysis (SA) is a major field of study in natural language processing, computational linguistics and information retrieval. Interest in SA has been constantly growing in both academia and industry over the recent years. Moreover, there is an increasing need for generating appropriate resources and datasets in particular for low resource languages including Persian. These datasets play an important role in designing and developing appropriate opinion mining platforms using supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised methods. In this paper, we outline the entire process of developing a manually annotated sentiment corpus, SentiPers, which covers formal and informal written contemporary Persian. To the best of our knowledge, SentiPers is a unique sentiment corpus with such a rich annotation in three different levels including document-level, sentence-level, and entity/aspect-level for Persian. The corpus contains more than 26000 sentences of users opinions from digital product domain and benefits from special characteristics such as quantifying the positiveness or negativity of an opinion through assigning a number within a specific range to any given sentence. Furthermore, we present statistics on various components of our corpus as well as studying the inter-annotator agreement among the annotators. Finally, some of the challenges that we faced during the annotation process will be discussed as well.

Despite the large number of computational resources for emotion recognition, there is a lack of data sets relying on appraisal models. According to Appraisal theories, emotions are the outcome of a multi-dimensional evaluation of events. In this paper, we present APPReddit, the first corpus of non-experimental data annotated according to this theory. After describing its development, we compare our resource with enISEAR, a corpus of events created in an experimental setting and annotated for appraisal. Results show that the two corpora can be mapped notwithstanding different typologies of data and annotations schemes. A SVM model trained on APPReddit predicts four appraisal dimensions without significant loss. Merging both corpora in a single training set increases the prediction of 3 out of 4 dimensions. Such findings pave the way to a better performing classification model for appraisal prediction.

Several adaptations of Transformers models have been developed in various domains since its breakthrough in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This trend has spread into the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR), including studies processing music data. However, the practice of leveraging NLP tools for symbolic music data is not novel in MIR. Music has been frequently compared to language, as they share several similarities, including sequential representations of text and music. These analogies are also reflected through similar tasks in MIR and NLP. This survey reviews NLP methods applied to symbolic music generation and information retrieval studies following two axes. We first propose an overview of representations of symbolic music adapted from natural language sequential representations. Such representations are designed by considering the specificities of symbolic music. These representations are then processed by models. Such models, possibly originally developed for text and adapted for symbolic music, are trained on various tasks. We describe these models, in particular deep learning models, through different prisms, highlighting music-specialized mechanisms. We finally present a discussion surrounding the effective use of NLP tools for symbolic music data. This includes technical issues regarding NLP methods and fundamental differences between text and music, which may open several doors for further research into more effectively adapting NLP tools to symbolic MIR.

This study investigates the potential of large language models (LLMs) to provide accurate estimates of concreteness, valence and arousal for multi-word expressions. Unlike previous artificial intelligence (AI) methods, LLMs can capture the nuanced meanings of multi-word expressions. We systematically evaluated ChatGPT-4o's ability to predict concreteness, valence and arousal. In Study 1, ChatGPT-4o showed strong correlations with human concreteness ratings (r = .8) for multi-word expressions. In Study 2, these findings were repeated for valence and arousal ratings of individual words, matching or outperforming previous AI models. Study 3 extended the prevalence and arousal analysis to multi-word expressions and showed promising results despite the lack of large-scale human benchmarks. These findings highlight the potential of LLMs for generating valuable psycholinguistic data related to multiword expressions. To help researchers with stimulus selection, we provide datasets with AI norms of concreteness, valence and arousal for 126,397 English single words and 63,680 multi-word expressions

Reviewing contracts is a time-consuming procedure that incurs large expenses to companies and social inequality to those who cannot afford it. In this work, we propose "document-level natural language inference (NLI) for contracts", a novel, real-world application of NLI that addresses such problems. In this task, a system is given a set of hypotheses (such as "Some obligations of Agreement may survive termination.") and a contract, and it is asked to classify whether each hypothesis is "entailed by", "contradicting to" or "not mentioned by" (neutral to) the contract as well as identifying "evidence" for the decision as spans in the contract. We annotated and release the largest corpus to date consisting of 607 annotated contracts. We then show that existing models fail badly on our task and introduce a strong baseline, which (1) models evidence identification as multi-label classification over spans instead of trying to predict start and end tokens, and (2) employs more sophisticated context segmentation for dealing with long documents. We also show that linguistic characteristics of contracts, such as negations by exceptions, are contributing to the difficulty of this task and that there is much room for improvement.

Despite significant popularity, Large-language Models (LLMs) require explicit, contextual facts to support domain-specific knowledge-intensive tasks in the design process. The applications built using LLMs should hence adopt Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to better suit the design process. In this article, we present a data-driven method to identify explicit facts from patent documents that provide standard descriptions of over 8 million artefacts. In our method, we train roBERTa Transformer-based sequence classification models using our dataset of 44,227 sentences and facts. Upon classifying tokens in a sentence as entities or relationships, our method uses another classifier to identify specific relationship tokens for a given pair of entities so that explicit facts of the form head entity :: relationship :: tail entity are identified. In the benchmark approaches for constructing facts, we use linear classifiers and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) both incorporating BERT Transformer-based token embeddings to predict associations among the entities and relationships. We apply our method to 4,870 fan system related patents and populate a knowledge base of around 3 million facts. Upon retrieving the facts representing generalisable domain knowledge and the knowledge of specific subsystems and issues, we demonstrate how these facts contextualise LLMs for generating text that is more relevant to the design process.

We introduce Korean Language Understanding Evaluation (KLUE) benchmark. KLUE is a collection of 8 Korean natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, including Topic Classification, SemanticTextual Similarity, Natural Language Inference, Named Entity Recognition, Relation Extraction, Dependency Parsing, Machine Reading Comprehension, and Dialogue State Tracking. We build all of the tasks from scratch from diverse source corpora while respecting copyrights, to ensure accessibility for anyone without any restrictions. With ethical considerations in mind, we carefully design annotation protocols. Along with the benchmark tasks and data, we provide suitable evaluation metrics and fine-tuning recipes for pretrained language models for each task. We furthermore release the pretrained language models (PLM), KLUE-BERT and KLUE-RoBERTa, to help reproducing baseline models on KLUE and thereby facilitate future research. We make a few interesting observations from the preliminary experiments using the proposed KLUE benchmark suite, already demonstrating the usefulness of this new benchmark suite. First, we find KLUE-RoBERTa-large outperforms other baselines, including multilingual PLMs and existing open-source Korean PLMs. Second, we see minimal degradation in performance even when we replace personally identifiable information from the pretraining corpus, suggesting that privacy and NLU capability are not at odds with each other. Lastly, we find that using BPE tokenization in combination with morpheme-level pre-tokenization is effective in tasks involving morpheme-level tagging, detection and generation. In addition to accelerating Korean NLP research, our comprehensive documentation on creating KLUE will facilitate creating similar resources for other languages in the future. KLUE is available at https://klue-benchmark.com.

French language models, such as CamemBERT, have been widely adopted across industries for natural language processing (NLP) tasks, with models like CamemBERT seeing over 4 million downloads per month. However, these models face challenges due to temporal concept drift, where outdated training data leads to a decline in performance, especially when encountering new topics and terminology. This issue emphasizes the need for updated models that reflect current linguistic trends. In this paper, we introduce two new versions of the CamemBERT base model-CamemBERTav2 and CamemBERTv2-designed to address these challenges. CamemBERTav2 is based on the DeBERTaV3 architecture and makes use of the Replaced Token Detection (RTD) objective for better contextual understanding, while CamemBERTv2 is built on RoBERTa, which uses the Masked Language Modeling (MLM) objective. Both models are trained on a significantly larger and more recent dataset with longer context length and an updated tokenizer that enhances tokenization performance for French. We evaluate the performance of these models on both general-domain NLP tasks and domain-specific applications, such as medical field tasks, demonstrating their versatility and effectiveness across a range of use cases. Our results show that these updated models vastly outperform their predecessors, making them valuable tools for modern NLP systems. All our new models, as well as intermediate checkpoints, are made openly available on Huggingface.

Paraphrases represent a human's intuitive ability to understand expressions presented in various different ways. Current paraphrase evaluations of language models primarily use binary approaches, offering limited interpretability of specific text changes. Atomic paraphrase types (APT) decompose paraphrases into different linguistic changes and offer a granular view of the flexibility in linguistic expression (e.g., a shift in syntax or vocabulary used). In this study, we assess the human preferences towards ChatGPT in generating English paraphrases with ten APTs and five prompting techniques. We introduce APTY (Atomic Paraphrase TYpes), a dataset of 500 sentence-level and word-level annotations by 15 annotators. The dataset also provides a human preference ranking of paraphrases with different types that can be used to fine-tune models with RLHF and DPO methods. Our results reveal that ChatGPT can generate simple APTs, such as additions and deletions, but struggle with complex structures (e.g., subordination changes). This study contributes to understanding which aspects of paraphrasing language models have already succeeded at understanding and what remains elusive. In addition, our curated datasets can be used to develop language models with specific linguistic capabilities.

This paper investigates data-driven segmentation using Re-Pair or Byte Pair Encoding-techniques. In contrast to previous work which has primarily been focused on subword units for machine translation, we are interested in the general properties of such segments above the word level. We call these segments r-grams, and discuss their properties and the effect they have on the token frequency distribution. The proposed approach is evaluated by demonstrating its viability in embedding techniques, both in monolingual and multilingual test settings. We also provide a number of qualitative examples of the proposed methodology, demonstrating its viability as a language-invariant segmentation procedure.

Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenizers, widely used in Large Language Models, face challenges in multilingual settings, including penalization of non-Western scripts and the creation of tokens with partial UTF-8 sequences. Pretokenization, often reliant on complex regular expressions, can also introduce fragility and unexpected edge cases. We propose SCRIPT (Script Category Representation in PreTokenization), a novel encoding scheme that bypasses UTF-8 byte conversion by using initial tokens based on Unicode script and category properties. This approach enables a simple, rule-based pretokenization strategy that respects script boundaries, offering a robust alternative to pretokenization strategies based on regular expressions. We also introduce and validate a constrained BPE merging strategy that enforces character integrity, applicable to both SCRIPT-BPE and byte-based BPE. Our experiments demonstrate that SCRIPT-BPE achieves competitive compression while eliminating encoding-based penalties for non-Latin-script languages.

Indian Sign Language has limited resources for developing machine learning and data-driven approaches for automated language processing. Though text/audio-based language processing techniques have shown colossal research interest and tremendous improvements in the last few years, Sign Languages still need to catch up due to the need for more resources. To bridge this gap, in this work, we propose iSign: a benchmark for Indian Sign Language (ISL) Processing. We make three primary contributions to this work. First, we release one of the largest ISL-English datasets with more than 118K video-sentence/phrase pairs. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest sign language dataset available for ISL. Second, we propose multiple NLP-specific tasks (including SignVideo2Text, SignPose2Text, Text2Pose, Word Prediction, and Sign Semantics) and benchmark them with the baseline models for easier access to the research community. Third, we provide detailed insights into the proposed benchmarks with a few linguistic insights into the workings of ISL. We streamline the evaluation of Sign Language processing, addressing the gaps in the NLP research community for Sign Languages. We release the dataset, tasks, and models via the following website: https://exploration-lab.github.io/iSign/

Warning: This paper contains content that may be offensive or upsetting. Understanding the harms and offensiveness of statements requires reasoning about the social and situational context in which statements are made. For example, the utterance "your English is very good" may implicitly signal an insult when uttered by a white man to a non-white colleague, but uttered by an ESL teacher to their student would be interpreted as a genuine compliment. Such contextual factors have been largely ignored by previous approaches to toxic language detection. We introduce COBRA frames, the first context-aware formalism for explaining the intents, reactions, and harms of offensive or biased statements grounded in their social and situational context. We create COBRACORPUS, a dataset of 33k potentially offensive statements paired with machine-generated contexts and free-text explanations of offensiveness, implied biases, speaker intents, and listener reactions. To study the contextual dynamics of offensiveness, we train models to generate COBRA explanations, with and without access to the context. We find that explanations by context-agnostic models are significantly worse than by context-aware ones, especially in situations where the context inverts the statement's offensiveness (29% accuracy drop). Our work highlights the importance and feasibility of contextualized NLP by modeling social factors.

To fully understand the behavior of a large language model (LLM) requires our understanding of its input space. If this input space differs from our assumption, our understanding of and conclusions about the LLM is likely flawed, regardless of its architecture. Here, we elucidate the structure of the token embeddings, the input domain for LLMs, both empirically and theoretically. We present a generalized and statistically testable model where the neighborhood of each token splits into well-defined signal and noise dimensions. This model is based on a generalization of a manifold called a fiber bundle, so we denote our hypothesis test as the ``fiber bundle null.'' Failing to reject the null is uninformative, but rejecting it at a specific token indicates that token has a statistically significant local structure, and so is of interest to us. By running our test over several open-source LLMs, each with unique token embeddings, we find that the null is frequently rejected, and so the token subspace is provably not a fiber bundle and hence also not a manifold. As a consequence of our findings, when an LLM is presented with two semantically equivalent prompts, and if one prompt contains a token implicated by our test, that prompt will likely exhibit more output variability proportional to the local signal dimension of the token.

Despite extensive research on toxic speech detection in text, a critical gap remains in handling spoken Mandarin audio. The lack of annotated datasets that capture the unique prosodic cues and culturally specific expressions in Mandarin leaves spoken toxicity underexplored. To address this, we introduce ToxicTone -- the largest public dataset of its kind -- featuring detailed annotations that distinguish both forms of toxicity (e.g., profanity, bullying) and sources of toxicity (e.g., anger, sarcasm, dismissiveness). Our data, sourced from diverse real-world audio and organized into 13 topical categories, mirrors authentic communication scenarios. We also propose a multimodal detection framework that integrates acoustic, linguistic, and emotional features using state-of-the-art speech and emotion encoders. Extensive experiments show our approach outperforms text-only and baseline models, underscoring the essential role of speech-specific cues in revealing hidden toxic expressions.

This paper presents the results of the SUN team for the Compound Expressions Recognition Challenge of the 6th ABAW Competition. We propose a novel audio-visual method for compound expression recognition. Our method relies on emotion recognition models that fuse modalities at the emotion probability level, while decisions regarding the prediction of compound expressions are based on predefined rules. Notably, our method does not use any training data specific to the target task. The method is evaluated in multi-corpus training and cross-corpus validation setups. Our findings from the challenge demonstrate that the proposed method can potentially form a basis for development of intelligent tools for annotating audio-visual data in the context of human's basic and compound emotions. The source code is publicly available.

Current approaches to empathetic response generation view the set of emotions expressed in the input text as a flat structure, where all the emotions are treated uniformly. We argue that empathetic responses often mimic the emotion of the user to a varying degree, depending on its positivity or negativity and content. We show that the consideration of this polarity-based emotion clusters and emotional mimicry results in improved empathy and contextual relevance of the response as compared to the state-of-the-art. Also, we introduce stochasticity into the emotion mixture that yields emotionally more varied empathetic responses than the previous work. We demonstrate the importance of these factors to empathetic response generation using both automatic- and human-based evaluations. The implementation of MIME is publicly available at https://github.com/declare-lab/MIME.

We introduce SignBank+, a clean version of the SignBank dataset, optimized for machine translation between spoken language text and SignWriting, a phonetic sign language writing system. In addition to previous work that employs complex factorization techniques to enable translation between text and SignWriting, we show that a traditional text-to-text translation approach performs equally effectively on the cleaned SignBank+ dataset. Our evaluation results indicate that models trained on SignBank+ surpass those on the original dataset, establishing a new benchmark for SignWriting-based sign language translation and providing an open resource for future research.

We often verbally express emotions in a multifaceted manner, they may vary in their intensities and may be expressed not just as a single but as a mixture of emotions. This wide spectrum of emotions is well-studied in the structural model of emotions, which represents variety of emotions as derivative products of primary emotions with varying degrees of intensity. In this paper, we propose an emotional text-to-speech design to simulate a wider spectrum of emotions grounded on the structural model. Our proposed design, Daisy-TTS, incorporates a prosody encoder to learn emotionally-separable prosody embedding as a proxy for emotion. This emotion representation allows the model to simulate: (1) Primary emotions, as learned from the training samples, (2) Secondary emotions, as a mixture of primary emotions, (3) Intensity-level, by scaling the emotion embedding, and (4) Emotions polarity, by negating the emotion embedding. Through a series of perceptual evaluations, Daisy-TTS demonstrated overall higher emotional speech naturalness and emotion perceiveability compared to the baseline.

MER2025 is the third year of our MER series of challenges, aiming to bring together researchers in the affective computing community to explore emerging trends and future directions in the field. Previously, MER2023 focused on multi-label learning, noise robustness, and semi-supervised learning, while MER2024 introduced a new track dedicated to open-vocabulary emotion recognition. This year, MER2025 centers on the theme "When Affective Computing Meets Large Language Models (LLMs)".We aim to shift the paradigm from traditional categorical frameworks reliant on predefined emotion taxonomies to LLM-driven generative methods, offering innovative solutions for more accurate and reliable emotion understanding. The challenge features four tracks: MER-SEMI focuses on fixed categorical emotion recognition enhanced by semi-supervised learning; MER-FG explores fine-grained emotions, expanding recognition from basic to nuanced emotional states; MER-DES incorporates multimodal cues (beyond emotion words) into predictions to enhance model interpretability; MER-PR investigates whether emotion prediction results can improve personality recognition performance. For the first three tracks, baseline code is available at MERTools, and datasets can be accessed via Hugging Face. For the last track, the dataset and baseline code are available on GitHub.

The increasing adoption of text-to-speech technologies has led to a growing demand for natural and emotive voices that adapt to a conversation's context and emotional tone. The Emotive Narrative Storytelling (EMNS) corpus is a unique speech dataset created to enhance conversations' expressiveness and emotive quality in interactive narrative-driven systems. The corpus consists of a 2.3-hour recording featuring a female speaker delivering labelled utterances. It encompasses eight acted emotional states, evenly distributed with a variance of 0.68%, along with expressiveness levels and natural language descriptions with word emphasis labels. The evaluation of audio samples from different datasets revealed that the EMNS corpus achieved the highest average scores in accurately conveying emotions and demonstrating expressiveness. It outperformed other datasets in conveying shared emotions and achieved comparable levels of genuineness. A classification task confirmed the accurate representation of intended emotions in the corpus, with participants recognising the recordings as genuine and expressive. Additionally, the availability of the dataset collection tool under the Apache 2.0 License simplifies remote speech data collection for researchers.

We study the fractal structure of language, aiming to provide a precise formalism for quantifying properties that may have been previously suspected but not formally shown. We establish that language is: (1) self-similar, exhibiting complexities at all levels of granularity, with no particular characteristic context length, and (2) long-range dependent (LRD), with a Hurst parameter of approximately H=0.70. Based on these findings, we argue that short-term patterns/dependencies in language, such as in paragraphs, mirror the patterns/dependencies over larger scopes, like entire documents. This may shed some light on how next-token prediction can lead to a comprehension of the structure of text at multiple levels of granularity, from words and clauses to broader contexts and intents. We also demonstrate that fractal parameters improve upon perplexity-based bits-per-byte (BPB) in predicting downstream performance. We hope these findings offer a fresh perspective on language and the mechanisms underlying the success of LLMs.

This paper presents CAMEO -- a curated collection of multilingual emotional speech datasets designed to facilitate research in emotion recognition and other speech-related tasks. The main objectives were to ensure easy access to the data, to allow reproducibility of the results, and to provide a standardized benchmark for evaluating speech emotion recognition (SER) systems across different emotional states and languages. The paper describes the dataset selection criteria, the curation and normalization process, and provides performance results for several models. The collection, along with metadata, and a leaderboard, is publicly available via the Hugging Face platform.

Paralinguistic vocalizations-including non-verbal sounds like laughter and breathing, as well as lexicalized interjections such as "uhm" and "oh"-are integral to natural spoken communication. Despite their importance in conveying affect, intent, and interactional cues, such cues remain largely overlooked in conventional automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) systems. We present NVSpeech, an integrated and scalable pipeline that bridges the recognition and synthesis of paralinguistic vocalizations, encompassing dataset construction, ASR modeling, and controllable TTS. (1) We introduce a manually annotated dataset of 48,430 human-spoken utterances with 18 word-level paralinguistic categories. (2) We develop the paralinguistic-aware ASR model, which treats paralinguistic cues as inline decodable tokens (e.g., "You're so funny [Laughter]"), enabling joint lexical and non-verbal transcription. This model is then used to automatically annotate a large corpus, the first large-scale Chinese dataset of 174,179 utterances (573 hours) with word-level alignment and paralingustic cues. (3) We finetune zero-shot TTS models on both human- and auto-labeled data to enable explicit control over paralinguistic vocalizations, allowing context-aware insertion at arbitrary token positions for human-like speech synthesis. By unifying the recognition and generation of paralinguistic vocalizations, NVSpeech offers the first open, large-scale, word-level annotated pipeline for expressive speech modeling in Mandarin, integrating recognition and synthesis in a scalable and controllable manner. Dataset and audio demos are available at https://nvspeech170k.github.io/.

Sentence encoder encode the semantics of their input, enabling key downstream applications such as classification, clustering, or retrieval. In this paper, we present Serafim PT*, a family of open-source sentence encoders for Portuguese with various sizes, suited to different hardware/compute budgets. Each model exhibits state-of-the-art performance and is made openly available under a permissive license, allowing its use for both commercial and research purposes. Besides the sentence encoders, this paper contributes a systematic study and lessons learned concerning the selection criteria of learning objectives and parameters that support top-performing encoders.

In this article we describe an efficient approach to guiding language model text generation with regular expressions and context-free grammars. Our approach adds little to no overhead to the token sequence generation process, and makes guided generation feasible in practice. An implementation is provided in the open source Python library Outlines.

Embedding layers in transformer-based NLP models typically account for the largest share of model parameters, scaling with vocabulary size but not yielding performance gains proportional to scale. We propose an alternative approach in which token embedding vectors are first generated deterministically, directly from the token IDs using a Fourier expansion of their normalized values, followed by a lightweight multilayer perceptron (MLP) that captures higher-order interactions. We train standard transformers and our architecture on natural language inference tasks (SNLI and MNLI), and evaluate zero-shot performance on sentence textual similarity (STS-B). Our results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive performance using significantly fewer parameters, trains faster, and operates effectively without the need for dropout. This proof-of-concept study highlights the potential for scalable, memory-efficient language models and motivates further large-scale experimentation based on our findings.

While Ukrainian NLP has seen progress in many texts processing tasks, emotion classification remains an underexplored area with no publicly available benchmark to date. In this work, we introduce EmoBench-UA, the first annotated dataset for emotion detection in Ukrainian texts. Our annotation schema is adapted from the previous English-centric works on emotion detection (Mohammad et al., 2018; Mohammad, 2022) guidelines. The dataset was created through crowdsourcing using the Toloka.ai platform ensuring high-quality of the annotation process. Then, we evaluate a range of approaches on the collected dataset, starting from linguistic-based baselines, synthetic data translated from English, to large language models (LLMs). Our findings highlight the challenges of emotion classification in non-mainstream languages like Ukrainian and emphasize the need for further development of Ukrainian-specific models and training resources.

This paper explores the use of open generative Large Language Models (LLMs) for annotation tasks in the social sciences. The study highlights the challenges associated with proprietary models, such as limited reproducibility and privacy concerns, and advocates for the adoption of open (source) models that can be operated on independent devices. Two examples of annotation tasks, sentiment analysis in tweets and identification of leisure activities in childhood aspirational essays are provided. The study evaluates the performance of different prompting strategies and models (neural-chat-7b-v3-2, Starling-LM-7B-alpha, openchat_3.5, zephyr-7b-alpha and zephyr-7b-beta). The results indicate the need for careful validation and tailored prompt engineering. The study highlights the advantages of open models for data privacy and reproducibility.

This work addresses a fundamental barrier in recommender systems: the inability to generalize across domains without extensive retraining. Traditional ID-based approaches fail entirely in cold-start and cross-domain scenarios where new users or items lack sufficient interaction history. Inspired by foundation models' cross-domain success, we develop a foundation model for sequential recommendation that achieves genuine zero-shot generalization capabilities. Our approach fundamentally departs from existing ID-based methods by deriving item representations exclusively from textual features. This enables immediate embedding of any new item without model retraining. We introduce unified item tokenization with Finite Scalar Quantization that transforms heterogeneous textual descriptions into standardized discrete tokens. This eliminates domain barriers that plague existing systems. Additionally, the framework features hybrid bidirectional-causal attention that captures both intra-item token coherence and inter-item sequential dependencies. An efficient catalog-aware beam search decoder enables real-time token-to-item mapping. Unlike conventional approaches confined to their training domains, RecGPT naturally bridges diverse recommendation contexts through its domain-invariant tokenization mechanism. Comprehensive evaluations across six datasets and industrial scenarios demonstrate consistent performance advantages.

Segmenting text into sentences plays an early and crucial role in many NLP systems. This is commonly achieved by using rule-based or statistical methods relying on lexical features such as punctuation. Although some recent works no longer exclusively rely on punctuation, we find that no prior method achieves all of (i) robustness to missing punctuation, (ii) effective adaptability to new domains, and (iii) high efficiency. We introduce a new model - Segment any Text (SaT) - to solve this problem. To enhance robustness, we propose a new pretraining scheme that ensures less reliance on punctuation. To address adaptability, we introduce an extra stage of parameter-efficient fine-tuning, establishing state-of-the-art performance in distinct domains such as verses from lyrics and legal documents. Along the way, we introduce architectural modifications that result in a threefold gain in speed over the previous state of the art and solve spurious reliance on context far in the future. Finally, we introduce a variant of our model with fine-tuning on a diverse, multilingual mixture of sentence-segmented data, acting as a drop-in replacement and enhancement for existing segmentation tools. Overall, our contributions provide a universal approach for segmenting any text. Our method outperforms all baselines - including strong LLMs - across 8 corpora spanning diverse domains and languages, especially in practically relevant situations where text is poorly formatted. Our models and code, including documentation, are available at https://huggingface.co/segment-any-text under the MIT license.

This paper explores the elusive mechanism underpinning in-context learning in Large Language Models (LLMs). Our work provides a novel perspective by examining in-context learning via the lens of surface repetitions. We quantitatively investigate the role of surface features in text generation, and empirically establish the existence of token co-occurrence reinforcement, a principle that strengthens the relationship between two tokens based on their contextual co-occurrences. By investigating the dual impacts of these features, our research illuminates the internal workings of in-context learning and expounds on the reasons for its failures. This paper provides an essential contribution to the understanding of in-context learning and its potential limitations, providing a fresh perspective on this exciting capability.

In this paper we present datasets of Facebook comment threads to mainstream media posts in Slovene and English developed inside the Slovene national project FRENK which cover two topics, migrants and LGBT, and are manually annotated for different types of socially unacceptable discourse (SUD). The main advantages of these datasets compared to the existing ones are identical sampling procedures, producing comparable data across languages and an annotation schema that takes into account six types of SUD and five targets at which SUD is directed. We describe the sampling and annotation procedures, and analyze the annotation distributions and inter-annotator agreements. We consider this dataset to be an important milestone in understanding and combating SUD for both languages.

Speech emotion recognition has become increasingly important in recent years due to its potential applications in healthcare, customer service, and personalization of dialogue systems. However, a major issue in this field is the lack of datasets that adequately represent basic emotional states across various language families. As datasets covering Slavic languages are rare, there is a need to address this research gap. This paper presents the development of nEMO, a novel corpus of emotional speech in Polish. The dataset comprises over 3 hours of samples recorded with the participation of nine actors portraying six emotional states: anger, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, and a neutral state. The text material used was carefully selected to represent the phonetics of the Polish language adequately. The corpus is freely available under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Entity-level fine-grained sentiment analysis in the financial domain is a crucial subtask of sentiment analysis and currently faces numerous challenges. The primary challenge stems from the lack of high-quality and large-scale annotated corpora specifically designed for financial text sentiment analysis, which in turn limits the availability of data necessary for developing effective text processing techniques. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have yielded remarkable performance in natural language processing tasks, primarily centered around language pattern matching. In this paper, we propose a novel and extensive Chinese fine-grained financial sentiment analysis dataset, FinChina SA, for enterprise early warning. We thoroughly evaluate and experiment with well-known existing open-source LLMs using our dataset. We firmly believe that our dataset will serve as a valuable resource to advance the exploration of real-world financial sentiment analysis tasks, which should be the focus of future research. The FinChina SA dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/YerayL/FinChina-SA

Recent dynamic tokenisation methods operate directly on bytes and pool their latent representations into patches. This bears similarities to computational models of word segmentation that determine lexical boundaries using spikes in an autoregressive model's prediction error. Inspired by this connection, we explore whether grouping predictable bytes - rather than pooling their representations - can yield a useful fixed subword vocabulary. We propose a new information-driven subword tokeniser, ByteSpan, that uses an external byte-level LM during training to identify contiguous predictable byte sequences and group them into subwords. Experiments show that ByteSpan yields efficient vocabularies with higher morphological alignment scores than BPE for English. Multilingual experiments show similar compression and R\'enyi efficiency for 25 languages.