David Kaczér


2025

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GRaMPa: Subword Regularisation by Skewing Uniform Segmentation Distributions with an Efficient Path-counting Markov Model
Thomas Bauwens | David Kaczér | Miryam de Lhoneux
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Stochastically sampling word segmentations from a subword tokeniser, also called subword regularisation, is a known way to increase robustness of language models to out-of-distribution inputs, such as text containing spelling errors. Recent work has observed that usual augmentations that make popular deterministic subword tokenisers stochastic still cause only a handful of all possible segmentations to be sampled. It has been proposed to uniformly sample across these instead, through rejection sampling of paths in an unweighted segmentation graph. In this paper, we argue that uniformly random segmentation in turn skews the distributions of certain segmentational properties (e.g. token lengths and amount of tokens produced) away from uniformity, which still ends up hiding meaningfully diverse tokenisations. We propose an alternative uniform sampler using the same segmentation graph, but weighted by counting the paths through it. Our sampling algorithm, GRaMPa, provides hyperparameters allowing sampled tokenisations to skew towards fewer, longer tokens. Furthermore, GRaMPa is single-pass, guaranteeing significantly better computational complexity than previous approaches relying on rejection sampling. We show experimentally that language models trained with GRaMPa outperform existing regularising tokenisers in a data-scarce setting on token-level tasks such as dependency parsing, especially with spelling errors present.

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Judging Quality Across Languages: A Multilingual Approach to Pretraining Data Filtering with Language Models
Mehdi Ali | Manuel Brack | Max Lübbering | Elias Wendt | Abbas Goher Khan | Richard Rutmann | Alex Jude | Maurice Kraus | Alexander Arno Weber | Felix Stollenwerk | David Kaczér | Florian Mai | Lucie Flek | Rafet Sifa | Nicolas Flores-Herr | Joachim Koehler | Patrick Schramowski | Michael Fromm | Kristian Kersting
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

High-quality multilingual training data is essential for effectively pretraining large language models (LLMs). Yet, the availability of suitable open-source multilingual datasets remains limited. Existing state-of-the-art datasets mostly rely on heuristic filtering methods, restricting both their cross-lingual transferability and scalability. Here, we introduce JQL, a systematic approach that efficiently curates diverse and high-quality multilingual data at scale while significantly reducing computational demands. JQL distills LLMs’ annotation capabilities into lightweight annotators based on pretrained multilingual embeddings. These models exhibit robust multilingual and cross-lingual performance, even for languages and scripts unseen during training. Evaluated empirically across 35 languages, the resulting annotation pipeline substantially outperforms current heuristic filtering methods like Fineweb2. JQL notably enhances downstream model training quality and increases data retention rates. Our research provides practical insights and valuable resources for multilingual data curation, raising the standards of multilingual dataset development.