Phonemes to the Rescue: Multilingual Tokenization Based on International Phonetic Alphabet
Multilingual language models often exhibit performance disparities across languages that can arise as early as the tokenization stage. Widely-used subword tokenization approaches favor high-resource languages, and tokenizer-free methods still yield longer sequences for scripts with a higher bytes-per-character ratio. To address these shortcomings, we propose to use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as a language-agnostic input representation for multilingual tokenizers. IPA provides a compact symbol inventory, greater cross-lingual character overlap, and a more balanced byte-per-character distribution across languages. We train matched pairs of text vs. IPA subword tokenizers acro...
| Authors | Milan Miletić, Julie Kallini, Ekaterina Shutova |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 18 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 June 2026 |
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