The paper shows that HuggingFace’s ByteLevel pre‑tokenizer, which treats a word as a sequence of Unicode letters, splits abugida scripts at every vowel sign, creating a training‑free lower bound on tokenizer fertility. Across 26 languages, all 17 abugidas exhibit increased token counts (up to 9×), while Latin, Cyrillic, Hangul, and Han remain unchanged. The authors demonstrate that correcting the character class reduces Nepali token counts, improves model performance, and that this issue is widespread in popular HuggingFace models.
By Sajal Regmi, Siddhartha Pudasaini, Chetan Phakami Pun
arXiv:2608. 03803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual language models are deployed across a hundred or more languages, yet most benchmarks test whether a model can perform a task _in_ a language rather than whether it commands the language itself, conflating fluency with proficiency.
By Tom\'a\v{s} Burkert, Angelika Peljak-{\L}api\'nska, David Zelen\'y
arXiv:2608. 12327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual pretrained models nominally support Nepali, yet no controlled benchmark has compared them under a single fine-tuning protocol.
By Suman Paudel, Sarbin Sayami
arXiv:2607. 23319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standard subword tokenization algorithms such as Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) and SentencePiece are trained predominantly on modern language corpora and produce inefficient segmentations when applied to classical Indian languages.
By Poornima Kumaresan, Pavithra Muruganantham, Lakshmi Rajendran, Santhosh Sivasubramani
Large language models (LLMs) process text through subword tokenizers rather than directly reading characters or words. Because these tokenizers are trained predominantly on English-centric corpora, they introduce a systematic and often overlooked disadvantage for many non-English languages.
arXiv:2607. 24276v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) process text through subword tokenizers rather than directly reading characters or words.
By Priyansh Srivastava
Manacá-1B is a 1.72‑billion‑parameter, open decoder‑only language model trained from scratch for Brazilian Portuguese, released with a fully containerized, reproducible training pipeline and complete logs. The authors evaluate it against nine open baselines on four Portuguese benchmarks, reporting standard errors and paired significance tests, and find that Manacá-1B outperforms smaller models on LAMBADA‑PT while remaining competitive on commonsense completion. They also uncover a tokenizer‑related evaluation pitfall that can drastically lower accuracy and provide a simple fix, releasing all code, logs, and corrected tokenizer for full reproducibility.
By Bruno Leonardo Santos Menezes, Carlos Leonardo Souza Cardoso, Fabio Andre Machado Porto
Large language models are increasingly deployed as general-purpose educational and technical assistance systems, but their underlying infrastructure does not treat languages equally. One underexamined source of disparity is tokenization: semantically equivalent content can require substantially different token counts across languages, affecting API cost, latency, and usable context length before a model is invoked.
Brazilian Portuguese remains under-served by open language models, and the few that exist are difficult to reproduce and are often compared without measures of uncertainty. We release Manacá-1B, an op...
arXiv:2607. 23322v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Instruction tuning has become the standard method for adapting large language models to follow human intent, yet existing instruction datasets are dominated by English-language general-knowledge tasks and lack coverage of specialized pedagogical domains.
By Shwetha Singaravelu, Gayathri Muruganantham, Lakshmi Rajendran, Santhosh Sivasubramani
arXiv:2608. 07629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual neural machine translation models such as NLLB-200 cover 200 languages but leave thousands unsupported, including most Grassfields Bantu languages of Cameroon.
By Samiratu Ntohsi, Neza David Tuyishimire, Anesu Kafesu, Marvin Ogore, Samuel Oluwajunwonlo Babalola, Oche Ankeli
arXiv:2410. 07809v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multilingual instruction tuning (MIT) is challenged by the curse of multilinguality, data scarcity, and high computational cost.
By G\"urkan Soykan, G\"ozde G\"ul \c{S}ahin