Tokenization: A Survey for Modern NLP [R]

Tokenization is a wildly understudied area of language modeling despite it having effects across all of NLP. Over the past ~8 months, 32 (!) tokenizer researchers put together the most comprehensive survey of the field. We cover every aspect of tokenization: algorithms, evaluations, multilinguality, encodings, theory, etc. We even cover what you might want to replace tokenizers with (e.g., latent or visual tokenization). We also cover some topics that are closely adjacent to tokenization, such as constrained generation, token healing, and tokenizer security concerns. Check it out! alphaxiv.org/abs/2609.tokenization-survey-modern-nlp