Lost in Sampling: Assessing Lexical Reachability in LLMs via the Word Coverage Score (WCS)

Abstract:Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) are often criticized for producing repetitive and homogeneous text, despite possessing vast latent vocabularies. While previous research has focused on model knowledge and training data, we investigate the role of decoding mechanics in suppressing linguistic diversity. We introduce the Word Coverage Score (WCS), a metric that quantifies the extent to which contextually appropriate human vocabulary is mathematically pruned by standard sampling filters (e.g., Top-$p$, Top-$k$, and Min-$p$). Rather than assessing static knowledge, the WCS measures the lexical survival rate of low-frequency, high-information human words as a function of sampling parameters. By auditing open-weight models on human-authored corpus fragments, we identify which logical lexical choices are rendered unreachable by the decoder, even when they reside within the probability space. Our results provide quantitative evidence that industry-standard sampling defaults act as unintended censorship mechanisms, smoothing the unique textures of human expression into a homogenized discourse. The WCS offers a rigorous framework for optimizing the trade-off between text coherence and lexical richness, providing a diagnostic tool for preserving the diversity of human language in generative models.

15 pages, 6 figures. Accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2026

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2605.27268 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2605.27268v2 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.27268 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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