When Tokenizers Fail: Byte-Level Chunking for Zero-Shot Transfer to Low-Resource Languages
Subword tokenization hinders low-resource language processing by imposing frequency patterns from dominant languages onto script-sharing variants. Byte-level models bypass this issue by processing raw UTF-8 characters, yet they create a granularity mismatch for word-level tasks in non-Latin scripts. Hierarchical byte-level architectures address this mismatch by grouping bytes into word-aligned chunks. However, these architectures require massive training data and suffer from representational misalignment when paired with frozen subword-based language models. In this paper, we propose an adapted hierarchical network framework that bridges this modality gap without extensive training. Our m...
| Authors | Sanjeev Kumar, Atsuki Yamaguchi, Nikolaos Aletras |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 27 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 August 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.