Compact Language, Complex Model Shifts: How and Where Ambiguity and Underspecification Affect LLMs
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
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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.
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...
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....
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.
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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.