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Technical GlossaryNatural Language Processing

Byte-Level Tokenization

An approach that tokenizes text at the byte level rather than character level to build more robust representations for multilingual and noisy input.

Byte-level tokenization provides strong robustness in multilingual environments and in inputs containing broken or unusual characters. It reduces heavy dependence on specific alphabets and handles rare symbols in a more controlled way. Some modern generative language models adopt byte-level representation precisely because of this flexibility.