Does Morphological Correctness Matter for Tokenization? A Scrambled Control Study in Tagalog
Typology-aware tokenizers are motivated by the claim that segmentation which respects morpheme boundaries preserves information that frequency-driven segmentation destroys. Studies routinely establish that it helps while assuming the boundaries must be linguistically correct. We separate them. Tagalog marks voice with infixes (s-um-ulat 'wrote', s-in-ulat 'was written'), so the root is not contiguous and no sequence of BPE merges can recover it. We build MorphAustro-Tok, a tokenizer that emits the root as a contiguous unit followed by a positional infix token, and compare it against a corpus-matched BPE baseline and, at two of three fertility levels, against a scrambled-morpheme control that preserves morph count, invertibility and per-type consistency while randomising the pseudo-infix. Across 33 runs, MorphAustro-Tok improves Tagalog machine translation over matched BPE by 0.84, 1.49 and 3.40 mean sentence-level chrF++ points. Token count does not explain the gain, since it grows as segmentation coarsens, and neither does capacity: at the coarsest level the scrambled arm carries more parameters and scores lower. Scrambling the analysis moves the gain by less than between-seed dispersion at both controlled levels, so we detect no contribution from morphological correctness at this scale.