Language models typically tokenize raw text into sequences of subword identifiers from a predefined vocabulary, a process inherently sensitive to typographical errors, length variations, and largely oblivious to the internal structure of tokens-issues we term the curse of tokenization. In this study, we delve into these drawbacks and demonstrate that large language models (LLMs) remain susceptible to these problems. This study systematically investigates these challenges and their impact on LLMs through three critical research questions: (1) complex problem solving, (2) token structure probing, and (3) resilience to typographical variation. Our findings reveal that scaling model parameters can mitigate the issue of tokenization; however, LLMs still suffer from biases induced by typos and other text format variations. Our experiments show that subword regularization such as BPE-dropout can mitigate this issue. We will release our code and data to facilitate further research.

大型语言模型存在分词问题，导致对错别字、长度差异和标记内部结构的忽视。本研究通过探究复杂问题解决、标记结构探测和对错别字的抵抗力来系统地调查这些挑战及其对大型语言模型的影响，并展示模型参数缩放与子词规范化对解决这些问题的作用。

分词不足：分词的诅咒