The Limits of BPE Tokenization in Polish: Segmentation-Flexional Forms, Grammatical Anchoring, and First-Person Stability in Inflectional Language Models
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2609.17553 (cs)
[Submitted on 17 Jul 2026]
Title:The Limits of BPE Tokenization in Polish: Segmentation-Flexional Forms, Grammatical Anchoring, and First-Person Stability in Inflectional Language Models
Authors:Elzbieta Dawidek (University of Lower Silesia DSW Ideis)
View a PDF of the paper titled The Limits of BPE Tokenization in Polish: Segmentation-Flexional Forms, Grammatical Anchoring, and First-Person Stability in Inflectional Language Models, by Elzbieta Dawidek (University of Lower Silesia DSW Ideis)
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Abstract:This article analyzes BPE tokenization in Polish as a test case for the limits of statistical segmentation in an inflectional language. It asks whether frequency-based tokenization preserves linguistically relevant units, including orthographic form, phonemic and syllabic segmentation, derivational structure, inflectional endings, grammatical form, and the speaking subject. The material includes diagnostic words, a children's text, selected forms from the Preamble to the Constitution of the Republic of Poland, word-family tests, and examples with Polish diacritics and nasal vowels. BPE tokenizers may produce segments that coincide with syllabic or morphologically interpretable divisions, but remain dependent on the frequency of written forms. They do not systematically map orthographic representation onto phonemic structure or context-dependent phonetic realization. The results show that BPE stabilizes frequent surface fragments of grammatical exponents rather than grammatical categories themselves. A form such as ustanawiamy is not merely a sequence ending in -y, but a verbal form anchored in conjugation, person, number, tense, mood, and aspect. The article develops the concept of grammatical form anchoring. In Polish, forms such as poszlam, zrobilam, or bylam can establish the position of the speaking subject without an explicit pronoun. In interaction with AI, this exposes a further problem: a language model does not possess a stable grammatical "I", but reconstructs it contextually and may mirror the user's forms or shift grammatical gender. Roclawski's segmentation-flexional forms are proposed as a diagnostic framework for evaluating tokenization boundaries. More stable modeling of Polish may require sublexical stabilization, anchoring grammatical form in the inflectional system, representing sentence patterns and verbal valency, and maintaining the grammatical "I" in dialogue.
| Comments: | The preprint was first posted on SocArXiv on 24 May 2026; version 3 is available at this https URL English translation of a manuscript originally written in Polish |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| ACM classes: | I.2.7 |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2609.17553 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2609.17553v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.17553
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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View a PDF of the paper titled The Limits of BPE Tokenization in Polish: Segmentation-Flexional Forms, Grammatical Anchoring, and First-Person Stability in Inflectional Language Models, by Elzbieta Dawidek (University of Lower Silesia DSW Ideis)
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