Organizations: Stein Faculty of Computer and Information Science Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Beer Sheva, Israel
Abstract
Multilingual language models rely on shared subword vocabularies to represent multiple languages within a limited number of token units. While such sharing is often useful, it can also create cases in which identical surface forms are treated too uniformly across languages, even when their meanings or usage differ. We investigate this limitation through cross-lingual homographs and false friends, and examine whether introducing language information earlier in the tokenization process can improve their treatment. We propose a simple tokenizer-level intervention based on language cues: language-specific characters replacing initial characters of shared-vocabulary words, reducing common identity during vocabulary construction. In intrinsic analysis, we find through tokenizer-level statistics that BPE and UnigramLM often treat cross-lingual homographs in a largely language agnostic way, whereas the context-sensitive SaGe tokenizer diverges more strongly; our intervention removes this gap. In downstream English-to-X machine translation, our cues yield modest improvements in several settings, especially under BPE, although the effect is not consistent across all languages and evaluation sets. Overall, the findings suggest that adding lightweight language information at the tokenizer level is a promising direction for further exploration.
Cross-lingual transfer in language models is difficult to study in natural corpora because lexical overlap, morphology, data imbalance, and tokenization are entangled. We introduce an in-vitro framework with two procedurally generated languages that share the same ontology, typed grammar, and compositional structure, but differ in surface realization. This lets us independently vary lexical distance, minority-language proportion, tokenizer training regime, and vocabulary size, while evaluating transfer on a masked minority-language condition whose lexical forms are never observed during training. Across 700 controlled runs, we find that transfer is governed less by tokenizer balance or raw lexical similarity than by whether tokenization preserves reusable cross-lingual substructure. Smaller vocabularies often improve masked transfer by keeping words decomposable into shared fragments, whereas larger vocabularies can turn forms into language-specific atoms. We further show that transfer emerges as a staged process: grammatical and type-level competence precede masked lexical generalization. Finally, we attempt to explain this mechanism through tokenizer bridges and show that bridge strength correlates strongly with masked reachability.
Language-specific tokenizers improve tokenization quality and the downstream performance of models on those languages. However, using such a tokenizer comes at a cost: either a new model must be trained from scratch, or the vocabulary of an existing pretrained model must be adapted. We propose Language-adaptive Maximum a Posteriori (LangMAP) Tokenization, a tokenization scheme that extends the UnigramLM algorithm to the multilingual setting, producing language-specific tokenization from a single shared vocabulary. Notably, LangMAP can be used when training a multilingual language model from scratch or to adapt a pretrained model's tokenizer to individual languages without changing its vocabulary. While language labels are required at training time, a key feature of the algorithm is that it then performs language-specific tokenization at inference without knowledge of the input's language. Across 14 open-source tokenizers, 9 natural languages, and 9 programming languages, LangMAP improves morphological boundary alignment and, for all coding languages tested, alignment with abstract syntax tree (AST) leaf boundaries. In fine-tuning experiments, results are mixed: LangMAP improves target-language grammatical acceptability (MultiBLiMP) on the languages tested; its benefits are less consistent on knowledge-related tasks (Global-PIQA, Belebele).
Clara Meister, Suchir Salhan, Andrzej Szablewski +3
Tokenization is the first -- and often least scrutinized -- step of most NLP pipelines. Standard algorithms for learning tokenizers rely on frequency-based objectives, which favor languages dominant in the training data and consequently leave lower-resource languages with tokenizations that are disproportionately longer, morphologically implausible, or even riddled with <UNK> placeholders. This phenomenon ultimately amplifies computational and financial inequalities between users from different language backgrounds. To remedy this, we introduce Parity-aware Byte Pair Encoding (BPE), a variant of the widely-used BPE algorithm. At every merge step, Parity-aware BPE applies a fair-max rule that maximizes the compression gain of the currently worst-compressed language, trading a small amount of global compression for cross-lingual parity. We find empirically that Parity-aware BPE reduces tokenization inequality -- operationalized by the Gini coefficient of per-language token costs -- by up to 89% relative to Classical BPE. This comes with negligible impact on global compression rate and no evidence of systematic degradation in downstream LM performance.