diff --git a/measurements/perplexity/perplexity.py b/measurements/perplexity/perplexity.py
index cea5cc05e..482dcb735 100644
--- a/measurements/perplexity/perplexity.py
+++ b/measurements/perplexity/perplexity.py
@@ -121,13 +121,23 @@ def _compute(
         # if there is not an already assigned pad_token, assign an existing
         # special token to also be the padding token
         if tokenizer.pad_token is None and batch_size > 1:
-            existing_special_tokens = list(tokenizer.special_tokens_map_extended.values())
-            # check that the model already has at least one special token defined
-            assert (
-                len(existing_special_tokens) > 0
-            ), "If batch_size > 1, model must have at least one special token to use for padding. Please use a different model or set batch_size=1."
-            # assign one of the special tokens to also be the pad token
-            tokenizer.add_special_tokens({"pad_token": existing_special_tokens[0]})
+            if tokenizer.eos_token is not None:
+                tokenizer.pad_token = tokenizer.eos_token
+            else:
+                existing_special_tokens = list(tokenizer.special_tokens_map.values())
+                # check that the model already has at least one special token defined
+                assert (
+                    len(existing_special_tokens) > 0
+                ), "If batch_size > 1, model must have at least one special token to use for padding. Please use a different model or set batch_size=1."
+                # assign one of the special tokens to also be the pad token
+                tokenizer.add_special_tokens({"pad_token": existing_special_tokens[0]})
+
+        if max_length is None:
+            max_length = getattr(tokenizer, "model_max_length", None)
+
+            # Some tokenizers use very large sentinel values when no real max length is defined.
+            if max_length is None or max_length > 1e20:
+                max_length = getattr(model.config, "max_position_embeddings", None)
 
         if add_start_token and max_length:
             # leave room for <BOS> token to be added:
@@ -141,7 +151,7 @@ def _compute(
         encodings = tokenizer(
             data,
             add_special_tokens=False,
-            padding=True,
+            padding=batch_size > 1,
             truncation=True if max_tokenized_len else False,
             max_length=max_tokenized_len,
             return_tensors="pt",
diff --git a/metrics/perplexity/perplexity.py b/metrics/perplexity/perplexity.py
index 557172cdb..6b9bd4ccd 100644
--- a/metrics/perplexity/perplexity.py
+++ b/metrics/perplexity/perplexity.py
@@ -120,13 +120,23 @@ def _compute(
         # if there is not an already assigned pad_token, assign an existing
         # special token to also be the padding token
         if tokenizer.pad_token is None and batch_size > 1:
-            existing_special_tokens = list(tokenizer.special_tokens_map_extended.values())
-            # check that the model already has at least one special token defined
-            assert (
-                len(existing_special_tokens) > 0
-            ), "If batch_size > 1, model must have at least one special token to use for padding. Please use a different model or set batch_size=1."
-            # assign one of the special tokens to also be the pad token
-            tokenizer.add_special_tokens({"pad_token": existing_special_tokens[0]})
+            if tokenizer.eos_token is not None:
+                tokenizer.pad_token = tokenizer.eos_token
+            else:
+                existing_special_tokens = list(tokenizer.special_tokens_map.values())
+                # check that the model already has at least one special token defined
+                assert (
+                    len(existing_special_tokens) > 0
+                ), "If batch_size > 1, model must have at least one special token to use for padding. Please use a different model or set batch_size=1."
+                # assign one of the special tokens to also be the pad token
+                tokenizer.add_special_tokens({"pad_token": existing_special_tokens[0]})
+
+        if max_length is None:
+            max_length = getattr(tokenizer, "model_max_length", None)
+
+            # Some tokenizers use very large sentinel values when no real max length is defined.
+            if max_length is None or max_length > 1e20:
+                max_length = getattr(model.config, "max_position_embeddings", None)
 
         if add_start_token and max_length:
             # leave room for <BOS> token to be added:
@@ -140,7 +150,7 @@ def _compute(
         encodings = tokenizer(
             predictions,
             add_special_tokens=False,
-            padding=True,
+            padding=batch_size > 1,
             truncation=True if max_tokenized_len else False,
             max_length=max_tokenized_len,
             return_tensors="pt",
diff --git a/tests/test_perplexity.py b/tests/test_perplexity.py
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..1b744664f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/tests/test_perplexity.py
@@ -0,0 +1,27 @@
+import evaluate
+
+
+def test_perplexity_gpt2():
+    perplexity = evaluate.load("./metrics/perplexity", module_type="metric")
+
+    result = perplexity.compute(
+        predictions=["Hello world."],
+        model_id="gpt2",
+    )
+
+    assert "mean_perplexity" in result
+    assert len(result["perplexities"]) == 1
+
+
+def test_perplexity_long_input():
+    perplexity = evaluate.load("./metrics/perplexity", module_type="metric")
+
+    result = perplexity.compute(
+        predictions=["Hello world. " * 2000],
+        model_id="gpt2",
+        add_start_token=False,
+    )
+
+    assert "mean_perplexity" in result
+
+