Philip Whittington
2025
Tokenisation is NP-Complete
Philip Whittington | Gregor Bachmann | Tiago Pimentel
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Philip Whittington | Gregor Bachmann | Tiago Pimentel
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
In this work, we prove the NP-completeness of two variants of tokenisation, defined here as the problem of compressing a dataset to at most 𝛿 symbols by either finding a vocabulary directly (direct tokenisation), or selecting a sequence of merge operations (bottom-up tokenisation).