Slide 2: Introduction to Text Tokenization
Concept:
Text Tokenization is a fundamental concept in Natural Language Processing
(NLP).
To begin understanding it, we compare it to a familiar idea: “Divide and Rule.”
Analogy – Divide and Rule:
Means breaking a large task into smaller, manageable chunks.
This makes solving or processing the task easier and more efficient.
Slide 3, 4, 5: Understanding Divide and Rule with an Example
Explanation:
“Divide and rule” is like the strategy we use when tackling complex problems—
break them into parts.
For example:
When we eat, we don’t swallow the whole food item. We bite, chew, and
digest in steps. That’s how our body handles food better.
Similarly, in language processing, dividing the text helps computers better
understand and process it.
Slide 6: What are Tokens?
Definition:
Tokens are the smallest units of a text that carry meaning.
A token could be:
A word (e.g., “love”)
A punctuation mark (e.g., “!”)
A number (e.g., “2025”)
Even an emoji (e.g., “😊”)
Slide 7: Example of Tokens
Illustration:
Sentence: “I love pizza!”
Tokens: “I”, “love”, “pizza”, “!”
Each token represents a distinct, meaningful piece of the sentence.
Slide 8: What is Tokenization?
Definition:
Tokenization is the process of splitting a text into tokens.
It’s like “cutting” text into pieces that are easier for a computer to
understand.
Slide 9: Text Tokenization
Expanded View:
Tokenization is foundational to NLP.
It allows machines to break down and analyze text systematically.
Almost every NLP task—like sentiment analysis, translation, or chatbot
responses—starts with tokenization.
Slide 10: Different Levels of Tokenization
Overview:
Tokenization can happen at various levels:
Sentence level – breaks text into sentences.
Word level – breaks sentences into words.
Sub-word level – breaks words into smaller parts.
Character level – each character becomes a token.
Slide 11: Sentence-Level Tokenization
Detailed Explanation:
Splits entire text into separate sentences.
Example: “I love fruits. They are very healthy.”
Tokenized into: ["I love fruits.", "They are very healthy."]
Helps in analyzing one sentence at a time.
Slide 12: Word-Level Tokenization
Detailed Explanation:
Most common form.
Uses spaces and punctuation to split sentences into words.
Example: “I love fruits”
Tokenized into: ["I", "love", "fruits"]
Useful in understanding meaning, syntax, and semantics of language.
Slide 13: Character-Level Tokenization
Detailed Explanation:
Each character (including spaces and punctuation) becomes a token.
Example: “I love fruits”
Tokenized into: ["I", " ", "l", "o", "v", "e", " ", "f", "r", "u", "i",
"t", "s"]
Great for:
Spell checking
Language modeling
Handwriting or OCR applications
Slide 14: Sub-Word Level Tokenization
Detailed Explanation:
Splits words into smaller components: prefixes, suffixes, roots.
Example: “unhappiness”
Tokenized into: ["un", "happi", "ness"]
Helps with:
Handling rare or unfamiliar words
Reducing vocabulary size while maintaining semantic meaning
Widely used in modern NLP models like BERT, GPT.
Slide 15: N-Gram Tokenization
Detailed Explanation:
Extracts sequences of n tokens (words or characters).
Example:
Unigram (n=1): “I”, “love”, “fruits”
Bigram (n=2): “I love”, “love fruits”
Trigram (n=3): “I love fruits”
Captures context better than isolated tokens.
Helps in:
Text classification
Language modeling
Machine translation
Slide 16: Advantages and Disadvantages of Tokenization
Advantages:
Helps systems understand and process language more effectively.
Enables:
Sentiment Analysis
Machine Translation
Question Answering
Makes handling multiple languages and styles easier.
Disadvantages:
Can become complex:
Too many tokens at character/sub-word level
Higher computational cost
Some ambiguity:
E.g., tokenizing “U.S.A.” or contractions like “don’t”
Trade-off:
Simpler methods (like word-level) are fast but less flexible.
Complex methods (like sub-word/N-gram) handle language better but are resource-
intensive.
Choice depends on:
Your NLP task
Available resources
Required accuracy
Slide 17: Choosing the Right Tokenization
How to Choose:
Understand your data:
Is it noisy, structured, domain-specific?
Match your task:
Classification → word/N-gram
Translation → sub-word
Modeling spelling/characters → character-level
Experiment:
Compare results of different methods
Balance between accuracy and efficiency
Slide 18: Conclusion – Applications of Tokenization
Text Classification:
Used to tag texts (e.g., spam, sentiment).
Tokens help identify important keywords and context.
Machine Translation:
Tokens help map source to target language units.
Sub-word tokenization is especially useful here.
Named Entity Recognition (NER):
Tokens isolate entities like names, places, dates.
Important for search engines, digital assistants, etc.
Text Summarization:
Tokens are key in identifying and extracting main ideas.
Helps generate concise summaries from large documents.
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