Overview
The CANINE model was proposed in CANINE: Pre-training an Efficient Tokenization-Free Encoder for Language
Representation by Jonathan H. Clark, Dan Garrette, Iulia Turc, John Wieting. It's
among the first papers that trains a Transformer without using an explicit tokenization step (such as Byte Pair
Encoding (BPE), WordPiece or SentencePiece). Instead, the model is trained directly at a Unicode character-level.
Training at a character-level inevitably comes with a longer sequence length, which CANINE solves with an efficient
downsampling strategy, before applying a deep Transformer encoder.
The abstract from the paper is the following:
Pipelined NLP systems have largely been superseded by end-to-end neural modeling, yet nearly all commonly-used models
still require an explicit tokenization step. While recent tokenization approaches based on data-derived subword
