Tokka-Bench: Evaluating Tokenizers Across 100 Natural and 20 Programming Languages
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
Large language models rely on subword tokenizers whose quality varies across languages, yet no standardized multi-metric framework exists for broad comparative evaluation. We introduce Tokka-Bench, an open-source framework that evaluates tokenizers on five complementary metrics -- bytes per token, unique token coverage, subword fertility, word-split rate, and vocabulary composition -- across 100 natural languages (30+ scripts) and 20 programming languages, using language-aware segmentation adapted to each writing system. Comparing seven BPE tokenizers (GPT-2, GPT-4, gpt-oss, Llama 3.1, Gemma 3, Qwen3, and Kimi K2) within individual languages, we find that vocabulary allocation strategy matters more than raw vocabulary size, and that programming-language efficiency has converged among recent tokenizers despite divergent natural-language profiles. The framework, data, and interactive dashboard are publicly available.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 6 of its 9 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2026.
Builds on
6 of 9 references.
References · 6
- 2015Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Unitscited by 2,918
- 2018SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processingcited by 1,989
- 2024The FineWeb Datasets: Decanting the Web for the Finest Text Data at Scalecited by 1,160
- 2023StarCoder: may the source be with you!cited by 799
- 2020How Good is Your Tokenizer? On the Monolingual Performance of Multilingual Language Modelscited by 318
- 2023Do All Languages Cost the Same? Tokenization in the Era of Commercial Language Modelscited by 192
Built on by
Not cited yet.