QuechuaTok: Morphological Boundary Accuracy as a Necessary Metric for Tokenizer Evaluation in Agglutinative Low-Resource Languages

Tokenization is a foundational step in NLP pipelines, yet standard evaluation metrics such as fertility rate fail to capture morphological correctness for agglutinative languages. We present QuechuaTok, a systematic benchmark comparing four tokenization strategies:

• BPE
• Unigram LM
• WordPiece
• a morphology-aware PRPE tokenizer

for Southern Quechua (quz), a low-resource agglutinative language spoken by 8-10 million people in South America. Using a 200k-sentence corpus and the SQUOIA finite-state morphological analyzer (Rios, 2016) as silver standard, we evaluate three metrics: fertility rate, OOV rate, and morphological boundary accuracy (MorphAcc).

Our results show that BPE achieves the lowest fertility rate (1.636 at 16k vocab) by memorizing surface word forms, while achieving only 6.67% MorphAcc. PRPE achieves 83.33% MorphAcc - the highest of all systems - demonstrating that fertility rate alone is insufficient to evaluate tokenizers for agglutinative languages.

We further validate this finding extrinsically: on a Spanish-to-Quechua (Chanka) neural machine translation task, a model trained with PRPE outperforms an identical BPE-trained model by +68.7% BLEU and +17.0% chrF, showing that morphological boundary accuracy translates into measurable downstream gains.

All code and models are publicly available at kaggle.com/code/macmaky/quechuatok