Tokenizing Crosslingual Homographs
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 iden...
| Authors | Rotem Brillant, Yuval Pinter |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 20 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 July 2026 |
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