Word
tokenizer
Definition
n. a tool or program that breaks a long piece of text into smaller parts, like words or symbols. Computers use this to understand and process human language more easily.
n. a software component or algorithm that segments a string of text into discrete units, such as words, phrases, or symbols. Typically serves as the first stage in lexical analysis or natural language processing.
Examples
“The tokenizer splits the sentence into individual words.”
“Before the AI can analyze your request, a tokenizer converts the raw text into a sequence of numbers that the model understands.”
“Advanced tokenizers must handle complex linguistic features like contractions and punctuation to ensure that the resulting tokens accurately represent the semantic structure of the original input.”
Examples
simple
“The tokenizer splits the sentence into individual words.”
contextual
“Before the AI can analyze your request, a tokenizer converts the raw text into a sequence of numbers that the model understands.”
complex
“Advanced tokenizers must handle complex linguistic features like contractions and punctuation to ensure that the resulting tokens accurately represent the semantic structure of the original input.”
Usage
Commonly used in computer science and linguistics contexts.
Real-World Examples
“Perplexity averages log-probabilities per token, so a finer tokenizer (BPE, SentencePiece) that splits words into more pieces mechanically lowers perplexity even when the model is no better.” Etymology
Derived from the Middle English token, via the Old English tōcn, combined with the agentive suffix -izer.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Domain
Scan code
englishreference.com/q/tokenizer