arXiv · 2603.05883
VerChol -- Grammar-First Tokenization for Agglutinative Languages
Abstract
Tokenization is the foundational step in all large language model (LLM) pipelines, yet the dominant approach Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) and its variants is inherently script agnostic and optimized for English like morphology. For agglutinative languages a typological class encompassing the Dravidian family (Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam), Turkic languages (Turkish, Azerbaijani, Uzbek), Uralic languages (Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian), Korean, Japanese, Swahili, Basque, and others, a single word may encode root, tense, aspect, person, number, gender agreement, case, and postpositions into one orthographic unit. Statistical tokenizers fragment these words into byte pair chunks that sever morpheme boundaries and inflate token counts.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Prabhu Raja. 2026-03-06. VerChol -- Grammar-First Tokenization for Agglutinative Languages. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05883
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.