Tokenizers

Go bindings for the HuggingFace Tokenizers library.

Installation

make build to build libtokenizers.a that you need to run your application that uses bindings. In addition, you need to inform the linker where to find that static library: go run -ldflags="-extldflags '-L./path/to/libtokenizers/directory'" . or just add it to the CGO_LDFLAGS environment variable: CGO_LDFLAGS="-L./path/to/libtokenizers/directory" to avoid specifying it every time.

Using pre-built binaries

If you don't want to install Rust toolchain, build it in docker: docker build --platform=linux/amd64 -f release/Dockerfile . or use prebuilt binaries from the releases page.

Links to prebuilt libraries

• darwin-arm64
• darwin-aarch64
• darwin-x86_64
• linux-arm64
• linux-aarch64
• linux-amd64
• linux-x86_64
• linux-s390x
• linux-ppc64le

Getting started

TLDR: working example.

Load a tokenizer from a JSON config:

import"github.com/daulet/tokenizers"tk, err:=tokenizers.FromFile("./data/bert-base-uncased.json")
iferr!=nil {
returnerr
}
// release native resourcesdefertk.Close()

Load a tokenizer from Huggingface:

import"github.com/daulet/tokenizers"tk, err:=tokenizers.FromPretrained("google-bert/bert-base-uncased")
iferr!=nil {
returnerr
}
// release native resourcesdefertk.Close()

Encode text and decode tokens:

fmt.Println("Vocab size:", tk.VocabSize())
// Vocab size: 30522fmt.Println(tk.Encode("brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", false))
// [2829 4419 14523 2058 1996 13971 3899] [brown fox jumps over the lazy dog]fmt.Println(tk.Encode("brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", true))
// [101 2829 4419 14523 2058 1996 13971 3899 102] [[CLS] brown fox jumps over the lazy dog [SEP]]fmt.Println(tk.Decode([]uint32{2829, 4419, 14523, 2058, 1996, 13971, 3899}, true))
// brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

If you want explicit error handling for encode/decode calls, use EncodeErr, EncodeWithOptionsErr, and DecodeErr.

Encode text with options:

varencodeOptions []tokenizers.EncodeOptionencodeOptions=append(encodeOptions, tokenizers.WithReturnTypeIDs())
encodeOptions=append(encodeOptions, tokenizers.WithReturnAttentionMask())
encodeOptions=append(encodeOptions, tokenizers.WithReturnTokens())
encodeOptions=append(encodeOptions, tokenizers.WithReturnOffsets())
encodeOptions=append(encodeOptions, tokenizers.WithReturnSpecialTokensMask())
// Or just basically// encodeOptions = append(encodeOptions, tokenizers.WithReturnAllAttributes())encodingResponse:=tk.EncodeWithOptions("brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", false, encodeOptions...)
fmt.Println(encodingResponse.IDs)
// [2829 4419 14523 2058 1996 13971 3899]fmt.Println(encodingResponse.TypeIDs)
// [0 0 0 0 0 0 0]fmt.Println(encodingResponse.SpecialTokensMask)
// [0 0 0 0 0 0 0]fmt.Println(encodingResponse.AttentionMask)
// [1 1 1 1 1 1 1]fmt.Println(encodingResponse.Tokens)
// [brown fox jumps over the lazy dog]fmt.Println(encodingResponse.Offsets)
// [[0 5] [6 9] [10 15] [16 20] [21 24] [25 29] [30 33]]

Benchmarks

Tiktoken vs HuggingFace

Tiktoken is 3x faster on most tasks.

> go test . -ldflags="-extldflags '-L.'" -run=^\$ -bench=. -benchmem -count=1 -benchtime=1s
goos: darwin
goarch: arm64
pkg: github.com/daulet/tokenizers
cpu: Apple M1 Pro
BenchmarkEncodeNTimes/huggingface-10 133966 10456 ns/op 256 B/op 12 allocs/op
BenchmarkEncodeNTimes/tiktoken-10 339538 3759 ns/op 88 B/op 4 allocs/op
BenchmarkEncodeNChars/huggingface-10 456006800 2.798 ns/op 0 B/op 0 allocs/op
BenchmarkEncodeNChars/tiktoken-10 615315394 2.959 ns/op 0 B/op 0 allocs/op
BenchmarkDecodeNTimes/huggingface-10 817164 1489 ns/op 64 B/op 2 allocs/op
BenchmarkDecodeNTimes/tiktoken-10 2369224 513.9 ns/op 64 B/op 2 allocs/op
BenchmarkDecodeNTokens/huggingface-10 7423770 170.8 ns/op 4 B/op 0 allocs/op
BenchmarkDecodeNTokens/tiktoken-10 80597544 19.40 ns/op 4 B/op 0 allocs/op
PASS
ok github.com/daulet/tokenizers 40.626s

Go vs Rust

go test . -run=^\$ -bench=. -benchmem -count=10 > test/benchmark/$(git rev-parse HEAD).txt

Decoding overhead (due to CGO and extra allocations) is between 2% to 9% depending on the benchmark.

go test. -bench=. -benchmem -benchtime=10s
goos: darwin
goarch: arm64
pkg: github.com/daulet/tokenizers
BenchmarkEncodeNTimes-10 959494 12622 ns/op 232 B/op 12 allocs/op
BenchmarkEncodeNChars-10 1000000000 2.046 ns/op 0 B/op 0 allocs/op
BenchmarkDecodeNTimes-10 2758072 4345 ns/op 96 B/op 3 allocs/op
BenchmarkDecodeNTokens-10 18689725 648.5 ns/op 7 B/op 0 allocs/op
PASS
ok github.com/daulet/tokenizers 126.681s

Run equivalent Rust tests with cargo bench.

decode_n_times time: [3.9812 µs 3.9874 µs 3.9939 µs]
change: [-0.4103% -0.1338% +0.1275%] (p = 0.33 > 0.05)
No change in performance detected.
Found 7 outliers among 100 measurements (7.00%)
7 (7.00%) high mild
decode_n_tokens time: [651.72 ns 661.73 ns 675.78 ns]
change: [+0.3504% +2.0016% +3.5507%] (p = 0.01 < 0.05)
Change within noise threshold.
Found 7 outliers among 100 measurements (7.00%)
2 (2.00%) high mild
5 (5.00%) high severe

Contributing

Please refer to CONTRIBUTING.md for information on how to contribute a PR to this project.