gettone

gettone is a Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenizer developed specifically for Italian and used across the AlBERTurin family of encoder models.

It has a vocabulary size of 32,768 tokens and was designed to provide compact tokenization of Italian text while maintaining a moderate vocabulary size.

Usage

from transformers import AutoTokenizer

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("AlBERTurin/gettone")

text = "Questa è una frase di esempio in italiano."

tokens = tokenizer.tokenize(text)
encoded = tokenizer(text)

print(tokens)
print(encoded)

AlBERTurin Model Family

gettone is shared by all models in the AlBERTurin family:

Model	Parameters	Training Tokens
AlBERTmini	95M	7B
AlBERTina	140M	14B
AlBERTone101	450M	~101B

Tokenizer Evaluation

The tokenizer was evaluated using fertility, defined as the average number of subword tokens produced per word. Lower values indicate more compact tokenization.

On the evaluation corpus used in the AlBERTurin paper, gettone achieved a fertility score of 1.429, the lowest among the evaluated Italian and multilingual tokenizers.

Tokenizer	Type	Vocabulary Size	Fertility ↓
gettone	BPE	32,768	1.429
Velvet-2B	BPE	126,976	1.471
UmBERTo	BPE	32,005	1.493
dbmdz	WordPiece	31,102	1.497
Minerva-7B	BPE	51,200	1.560
Minerva-350M	BPE	32,768	1.644
XLM-R	Unigram	250,002	1.663
mBERT	WordPiece	119,547	1.719
EuroBERT	BPE	128,000	1.934

Citation

If you use gettone in your research, please cite:

Matteo Rinaldi, Marco Madeddu, Calogero Jerik Scozzaro, Matteo Delsanto, Daniele Paolo Radicioni, and Viviana Patti.
AlBERTurin: A Fully Open Family of Italian Encoder Models with Modern Architectures.
CLiC-it 2026.