Tokenization Strategies is a method of breaking up a text string into parts to enable easier processing and analysis of the data. It’s a crucial but often overlooked step in text analytics and natural language processing (NLP). Tokenization can also be seen as the first step for various types of text mining such as document clustering, information extraction, and text summarization. Tokenization strategies involve methods such as splitting apart sentences, phrases, words, and even individual characters.
Tokenization is essential in order to properly extract meaning and gain useful insights from text. It enables many machine learning models to operate more accurately and more efficiently on text input.
There are four major types of tokenization strategies, which vary in terms of their accuracy and speed of processing:
1. Word Tokenization: Word tokenization involves splitting apart words or sentences into individual words. This type of tokenization works best for strings of one language only. It removes punctuation marks, spaces, and other characters from a sentence.
2. Character Tokenization: This method splits text strings character by character. This can be useful for searching based on spelling, such as misspellings, proper nouns, and other such elements.
3. Tokenization by Punctuation: This approach splits text strings using punctuation marks, such as periods, commas, dashes, and other symbols. It can be used to extract sentences, phrases, and words based on their punctuation.
4. Sentence Tokenization: Sentence tokenization is a more complex approach that is used to break up sentences into smaller components, such as words, syllables, and phrases. This approach is useful for analyzing longer texts and more complex documents, such as those with multiple authors and topics.
Though tokenization may appear to be a simple task it is an important part of text processing and should be considered when developing dictionaries for websites. Tokenization strategies are used on various types of text data from voice transcripts to emails to determine the sentiment, topic, and purpose of the text. Furthermore, tokenization serves as a preprocessing step for many NLP tasks such as sentiment analysis, text summarization, and automatic question answering.
