What is Tokenization in NLP and why is it a fundamental step in Deep Learning pipelines?

Updated May 16, 2026

Short answer

Tokenization is the process of converting raw text into smaller units (tokens) that neural networks can process.

Deep explanation

Neural networks cannot directly process raw text; it must first be converted into numerical representations through tokenization.

Core idea:

  • Break text into meaningful units.

Types of tokenization:

  1. Word-level:
  • Splits by words.
  • Problem: unknown words.
  1. Character-level:
  • Splits into characters.
  • Large sequence length.
  1. Subword tokenization:
  • Most modern approach.
  • Balances vocabulary size and flexibility.

Methods:

  • Byte Pair Encoding (BPE)
  • WordPiece
  • SentencePiece…

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