The paper investigates why Word-in-Context (WiC) remains difficult for language models, suggesting that the lack of an explicit sense inventory contributes to the challenge. By evaluating open LLMs on both WiC and traditional Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) tasks, the authors find that providing candidate senses—akin to WSD—consistently improves WiC performance. Human evaluation indicates that many WiC errors stem from label ambiguity or mismatched sense boundaries, with models often over‑discriminating senses and making overly fine‑grained distinctions.
By Yi Zhou, Kiamehr Rezaee, Danushka Bollegala, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar, Jose Camacho-Collados
arXiv:2609.15991v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Standard subword tokenizers either treat every orthographic variation of a word (such as hello, Hello, HELLO, and H\'ello) as unrelated vocabulary entr...
By Connor Makowski, Willem Guter
arXiv:2603.03510v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: This study investigates the diverse characteristics of nouns, focusing on both semantic (e.g., countable/uncountable) and morphosyntactic (e....
By Mohamed El Idrissi
The paper introduces TokenAdapt, a model‑agnostic tokenizer transplantation method that uses a hybrid heuristic to initialize new token embeddings, and a novel pre‑tokenization learning approach for multi‑word Supertokens to improve compression. TokenAdapt combines local subword decomposition and global semantic similarity to preserve semantics while reducing retraining needs. Empirical results show that TokenAdapt outperforms existing baselines such as Transtokenizer and ReTok, achieving lower perplexity ratios and significant compression gains.
By Shaurya Sharthak, Vinayak Pahalwan, Adithya Kamath, Adarsh Shirawalmath
arXiv:2606. 05486v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prompt ambiguity is a common source of failure in large language models, but is difficult to localize because it is a latent property of the prompt, while existing attribution methods are designed to explain observable outputs such as logits or generated tokens.
By Govind Ramesh, Yao Dou, Wei Xu
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
The study investigates whether pretrained transformer models encode functional words—such as pronouns and adverbs—in a way that mirrors human usage. By comparing embeddings of nouns with those of their functional counterparts in both isolated and parallel sentences, the authors find that functional words occupy a central yet distinct position in embedding space and that parallel lexicalized and functional sentences reside in different subspaces. Experiments show that only a mixed training set of functional and lexicalized sentences reveals shared syntactic and semantic structure, whereas training on either type alone fails to capture this parallelism.
By Giuseppe Samo, Vivi Nastase, Paola Merlo
The paper examines how new vocabulary tokens are added to language models for generative recommendation tasks. It shows that the common practice of initializing these tokens as the mean of existing embeddings collapses them into a degenerate subspace, hindering fine‑tuning. The authors propose Grounded Token Initialization (GTI), which places new tokens at semantically meaningful positions in the pretrained embedding space using linguistic supervision, and demonstrate that GTI outperforms mean initialization and other adaptation methods across several benchmarks.
By Daiwei Chen, Zhoutong Fu, Chengming Jiang, Haichao Zhang, Ran Zhou, Tan Wang, Chunnan Yao, Guoyao Li, Rui Cai, Yihan Cao, Ruijie Jiang, Fedor Borisyuk, Jianqiang Shen, Jingwei Wu, Ramya Korlakai Vinayak
arXiv:2603. 18482v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Standard decoding strategies for text generation, including top-$k$, nucleus sampling, and contrastive search, select tokens based on likelihood, restricting outputs to high-probability regions.
By Esteban Garces Arias, Nurzhan Sapargali, Christian Heumann, Matthias A{\ss}enmacher
arXiv:2608. 15448v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models increasingly rely on sampling as a driver of their own improvement, making the fidelity of their learned distributions more critical than ever.
By Nicolas Zucchet, Hyun Dong Lee, Scott Linderman
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.
By Gyeongje Cho, Yeonkyoung So, Sangmin Lee, Jaejin Lee
arXiv:2609.37497v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Modern transformer models excel at capturing semantic relationships through sentence embeddings, yet their ability to perform pragmatic reasoning remai...
By Stefania Butnaru, Claudiu Creanga