17th-century Italian imposes a 2.4x surprisal tax on LLMs versus modern Italian with comparable tokenization costs to Russian, yet embeddings stay robust above 0.85 similarity and a temporal prompt reduces surprisal by 60%.
Levchenko, Evaluating LLMs for historical document OCR: A methodological framework for digital humanities, 2025
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How Surprising Is Historical Italian to Language Models? Tokenization Tax, Comprehension Tax, and a Simple Mitigation
17th-century Italian imposes a 2.4x surprisal tax on LLMs versus modern Italian with comparable tokenization costs to Russian, yet embeddings stay robust above 0.85 similarity and a temporal prompt reduces surprisal by 60%.