Subword Segmental BabyLMs: Learning to Tokenise for Sample-Efficient Pretraining

arXiv:2609.01151 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-09-01 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-09-01

Updated: 2026-09-01

Code: https://github.com/francois-meyer/subseg-babylms

Terminology

• Alignment — 5× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Transformer — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Benchmark — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Embeddings — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adaptation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Generalization — 1× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Generative Model — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Perplexity — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Regularization — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Tokenization — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• Evaluating Subword Tokenization: Alien Subword Composition and OOV Generalization Challenge
• Global PIQA: Evaluating Commonsense Reasoning Across 100+ Languages and Cultures
• BabyLM Turns 4 and Goes Multilingual: Call for Papers for the 2026 BabyLM Workshop

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