Measuring the Tokenization Premium: A Cost Audit for Underserved Language Communities
Large language models are increasingly deployed as general-purpose educational and technical assistance systems, but their underlying infrastructure does not treat languages equally. One underexamined source of disparity is tokenization: semantically equivalent content can require substantially different token counts across languages, affecting API cost, latency, and usable context length before a model is invoked. We introduce the Tokenization Equity Audit (TEA), a reproducible benchmark for measuring tokenization premiums in technical tutoring content. TEA evaluates three widely used tokenizers, GPT-4o's o200k base, Qwen2.5-7B, and Mistral-7B, on a 120-item Python debugging corpus trans...
| Authors | Avijit Roy, Proma Roy, Hrishitva Patel |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 10 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 August 2026 |
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