fromtransformersimportAutoModelForCausalLM,AutoTokenizermodel_id="Tamil-ai/tamil-qwen25-7b-instruct"tokenizer=AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_id)model=AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_id,torch_dtype="auto",device_map="auto",)messages=[{"role":"system","content":"You are a helpful Tamil language assistant."},{"role":"user","content":"வீடு என்ற சொல்லின் வேற்றுமை வடிவங்களைக் கூறுக."},]text=tokenizer.apply_chat_template(messages,tokenize=False,add_generation_prompt=True)inputs=tokenizer(text,return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)outputs=model.generate(**inputs,max_new_tokens=256)print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0],skip_special_tokens=True))
Tokenizer analysis across 6 base models showed Qwen2.5 has the best Tamil tokenization efficiency:
Model
Tamil Token Ratio
Verdict
Qwen2.5
4.62x
Best for Tamil
Llama 3.1
5.8x
Gemma 2
6.1x
Mistral
7.2x
Falcon
10.5x
Worst
Lower ratio = fewer tokens per Tamil word = more efficient training and inference.
Intended Use
Tamil question answering and instruction following
Tamil morphological analysis
Tamil grammar and linguistics tasks
Research on low-resource language LLMs
Limitations
Trained primarily on instructional Tamil; may underperform on colloquial/slang
Morphological accuracy varies by category (see benchmark results)
English capabilities may degrade compared to base Qwen2.5
Citation
@misc{tamilai2026,title={A Thousand Language Problem: Morphological Understanding in Linguistic AI},author={Tamil-AI},year={2026},publisher={HuggingFace},url={https://huggingface.co/Tamil-ai/tamil-qwen25-7b-instruct}}