Who Gets a Token, and What Does It Carry? Unequal Name Support and Concept Access in Large Language Models
Names are personal identifiers, but they also carry social meaning and are widely used to evaluate how language models treat different people. Such evaluations typically assume that matched names are comparable model inputs. We show that this assumption often fails at the lexical interface: matched names are not necessarily matched inputs. Some names receive direct single-token access, while others are assembled from multiple subwords, creating unequal name-surface support. Across nearly half a million first names and 12 LLM-associated tokenizers, direct lexical access is highly selective, model dependent, and uneven across race- and gender-associated name metadata. We introduce NameTrace...
| Authors | Mir Tafseer Nayeem, Davood Rafiei |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 28 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 September 2026 |
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