arXiv Computation and Language By Clara Meister, G\"ul Sena Alt{\i}nta\c{s}, Antoine Bosselut

Language-Specific Effects of Tokenizer Choice in Multilingual Language Models

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The study investigates how the choice of tokenizer influences multilingual language models across 54 tokenizers and 123 models. It finds that tokenizer impact is greater for languages with less training data, and that excluding a language from tokenizer training consistently worsens its performance. While reallocating tokenizer training data to lower-resource languages can help, it does not guarantee improvement, and the best tokenizer properties vary by language, enabling predictive screening of tokenizer candidates.

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