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.
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.
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.
arXiv:2606. 24460v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Commercial large language models bill, scale latency, and budget context per token.
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.
arXiv:2609.39001v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM services are billed per token and context windows are measured in tokens, yet the number of tokens needed for the same content varies across lang...
arXiv:2609.12960v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sanskrit fuses case, number, person and tense into word endings and chains clauses into compounds, so it is information-dense per word. Whether that de...
arXiv:2608.21384v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern multilingual tokenizers often fragment Ukrainian and other underrepresented Cyrillic-script languages more heavily than English, creating disp...
arXiv:2507.23248v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bengali is spoken by more than 230 million people, yet no standardized instrument evaluates large language models (LLMs) on Bengali across th...
arXiv:2506. 15138v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tokenization directly affects the inference efficiency of large language models, since fragmented tokenization increases sequence length and generation cost.
The paper introduces two new tokenisation algorithms—BottomUpLL and TopDownComp—to systematically explore the 2x2 design space defined by optimisation objective (compression vs. log‑likelihood) and search procedure (bottom‑up merging vs. top‑down pruning). Experiments across model sizes, vocabularies, and domains show that the search procedure, rather than the objective, consistently yields lower bits‑per‑byte, while no clear pattern emerges on the BLiMP benchmark. These findings clarify how tokeniser design choices influence language‑model performance and provide guidance for constructing tokenisers more principledly.
arXiv:2609.00378v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models pay a well-documented tax on non-English text: the same content costs several times more tokens, and because attention is quadrat...