Tokka-Bench: Evaluating Tokenizers Across 100 Natural and 20 Programming Languages

arXiv:2610.08794 · cs.CL, cs.AI · Submitted 2026-03-25 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL, cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-03-25

Updated: 2026-03-25

Comments: 5 pages, 5 figures. Code and data: https://github.com/bgub/tokka-bench. Interactive dashboard: https://tokka-bench.streamlit.app/

Code: https://github.com/bgub/tokka-bench

Project page: https://juditacs.github.io/2019

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Large language models rely on subword tokenizers whose quality varies across languages, yet no standardized multi-metric framework exists for broad comparative evaluation.

Abstract

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.

Related papers