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Sentencepiece Agent Skill

Language-independent tokenizer treating text as raw Unicode. Supports BPE and Unigram algorithms. Fast (50k sentences/sec), lightweight (6MB memory), deterministic vocabulary. Used by T5, ALBERT, XLNet, mBART. Train on raw text without pre-tokenization. Use when you need multilingual support, CJK languages, or reproducible tokenization.

4k tokens
context cost
the whole folder, loaded on every use
3
files
instructions only
0
copies elsewhere
how many repositories repackaged it
11362
stars on the repo
on the repository, not the skill itself

Install

one command, takes just this skill from the repository
npx skills add https://github.com/Orchestra-Research/AI-Research-SKILLs --skill sentencepiece

The instruction itself

25 sections, as written by the author

SentencePiece - Language-Independent Tokenization

Unsupervised tokenizer that works on raw text without language-specific preprocessing.

When to use SentencePiece

Use SentencePiece when:

  • Building multilingual models (no language-specific rules)
  • Working with CJK languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)
  • Need reproducible tokenization (deterministic vocabulary)
  • Want to train on raw text (no pre-tokenization needed)
  • Require lightweight deployment (6MB memory, 50k sentences/sec)

Performance:

  • Speed: 50,000 sentences/sec
  • Memory: ~6MB for loaded model
  • Languages: All (language-independent)

Use alternatives instead:

  • HuggingFace Tokenizers: Faster training, more flexibility
  • tiktoken: OpenAI models (GPT-3.5/4)
  • BERT WordPiece: English-centric tasks

Quick start

Installation

# Python
pip install sentencepiece

# C++ (requires CMake)
git clone https://github.com/google/sentencepiece.git
cd sentencepiece
mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. && make -j $(nproc)
sudo make install

Train model

# Command-line (BPE with 8000 vocab)
spm_train --input=data.txt --model_prefix=m --vocab_size=8000 --model_type=bpe

# Python API
import sentencepiece as spm

spm.SentencePieceTrainer.train(
    input='data.txt',
    model_prefix='m',
    vocab_size=8000,
    model_type='bpe'
)

Training time: ~1-2 minutes for 100MB corpus

Encode and decode

import sentencepiece as spm

# Load model
sp = spm.SentencePieceProcessor(model_file='m.model')

# Encode to pieces
pieces = sp.encode('This is a test', out_type=str)
print(pieces)  # ['▁This', '▁is', '▁a', '▁test']

# Encode to IDs
ids = sp.encode('This is a test', out_type=int)
print(ids)  # [284, 47, 11, 1243]

# Decode
text = sp.decode(ids)
print(text)  # "This is a test"

Language-independent design

Whitespace as symbol (▁)

text = "Hello world"
pieces = sp.encode(text, out_type=str)
print(pieces)  # ['▁Hello', '▁world']

# Decode preserves spaces
decoded = sp.decode_pieces(pieces)
print(decoded)  # "Hello world"

Key principle: Treat text as raw Unicode, whitespace = ▁ (meta symbol)

Tokenization algorithms

BPE (Byte-Pair Encoding)

spm.SentencePieceTrainer.train(
    input='data.txt',
    model_prefix='bpe_model',
    vocab_size=16000,
    model_type='bpe'
)

Used by: mBART

Unigram (default)

spm.SentencePieceTrainer.train(
    input='data.txt',
    model_prefix='unigram_model',
    vocab_size=8000,
    model_type='unigram'
)

Used by: T5, ALBERT, XLNet

Training configuration

Essential parameters

spm.SentencePieceTrainer.train(
    input='corpus.txt',
    model_prefix='m',
    vocab_size=32000,
    model_type='unigram',
    character_coverage=0.9995,  # 1.0 for CJK
    user_defined_symbols=['[SEP]', '[CLS]'],
    unk_piece='<unk>',
    num_threads=16
)

Character coverage

| Language Type | Coverage | Rationale |

|---------------|----------|-----------|

| English | 0.9995 | Most common chars |

| CJK (Chinese) | 1.0 | All characters needed |

| Multilingual | 0.9995 | Balance |

Encoding options

Subword regularization

# Sample different tokenizations
for _ in range(3):
    pieces = sp.encode('tokenization', out_type=str, enable_sampling=True, alpha=0.1)
    print(pieces)

# Output (different each time):
# ['▁token', 'ization']
# ['▁tok', 'en', 'ization']

Use case: Data augmentation for robustness.

Common patterns

T5-style training

spm.SentencePieceTrainer.train(
    input='c4_corpus.txt',
    model_prefix='t5',
    vocab_size=32000,
    model_type='unigram',
    user_defined_symbols=[f'<extra_id_{i}>' for i in range(100)],
    unk_id=2,
    eos_id=1,
    pad_id=0
)

Integration with transformers

from transformers import T5Tokenizer

# T5 uses SentencePiece internally
tokenizer = T5Tokenizer.from_pretrained('t5-base')
inputs = tokenizer('translate English to French: Hello', return_tensors='pt')

Performance benchmarks

Training speed

| Corpus | BPE (16k) | Unigram (8k) |

|--------|-----------|--------------|

| 100 MB | 1-2 min | 3-4 min |

| 1 GB | 10-15 min | 30-40 min |

Tokenization speed

  • SentencePiece: 50,000 sentences/sec
  • HF Tokenizers: 200,000 sentences/sec (4× faster)

Supported models

T5 family: t5-base, t5-large (32k vocab, Unigram)

ALBERT: albert-base-v2 (30k vocab, Unigram)

XLNet: xlnet-base-cased (32k vocab, Unigram)

mBART: facebook/mbart-large-50 (250k vocab, BPE)

References

  • Training Guide - Detailed options, corpus preparation
  • Algorithms - BPE vs Unigram, subword regularization

Resources

  • GitHub: https://github.com/google/sentencepiece ⭐ 10,000+
  • Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.06226 (EMNLP 2018)
  • Version: 0.2.0+

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How to use it

Copy the folder

Take orchestra-research/sentencepiece from the repository into ~/.claude/skills for personal use, or into .claude/skills inside a project.

Check the name does not clash

The agent identifies a skill by the name field in its header. Two skills with the same name cannot sit side by side — one of them will be ignored.

Install what it needs

The instructions reference pip. Without those the skill loads but fails at the first command.