Breaking a stream of text up into chunks for analysis or further processing
Also known as tokenisation
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3 identifiers linking tokenization across the web's reference databases
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Lexical tokenization is conversion of a text into meaningful lexical tokens belonging to categories defined by a "lexer" program. In case of a natural language, those categories include nouns, verbs, adjectives, punctuations etc. In case of a programming language, the categories include identifiers, operators, grouping symbols, data types and language keywords. Lexical tokenization is related to the type of tokenization used in large language models (LLMs) but with two differences. First, lexical tokenization is usually based on a lexical grammar, whereas LLM tokenizers are usually probability-based. Second, LLM tokenizers perform a second step that converts the tokens into numerical values.