Every Time I Hire a Linguist, Inference Costs Go Down: On Linguistic Rules as Effective Prompt Compressors
Prompt compression shortens LLM input to reduce inference cost, yet existing methods score token importance through LM forward passes. It remains questionable whether such nuanced, costly token selection is necessary. Compression requires identifying informative content, a problem that linguistic research has long addressed through cues that can be operationalized as deterministic rules. We therefore ask: can \textbf{linguistic rules alone} serve as effective prompt compressors, without LM-based scoring at compression time? To address this, we conduct offline evolutionary search over lexical, syntactic, semantic, and discourse seeds to find competitive rule combinations. The resulting lin...
| Authors | Jianfei Ma, Zhaoxin Feng, Emmanuele Chersoni et al. |
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| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 28 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 October 2026 |
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