### Tokenization in NLP
Tokenization is the process of breaking down a text into smaller units called tokens. These tokens can be words, subwords, characters, or even phrases, depending on the level of granularity required. Tokenization is a fundamental step in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and is used in models like ChatGPT.
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### Types of Tokenization
#### 1. Word Tokenization - Splits text into words based on spaces and punctuation. - Example:
- Input: *“The neurosurgeon performs a complex surgery.”*
- Tokens: `[“The”, “neurosurgeon”, “performs”, “a”, “complex”, “surgery”, “.”]`
#### 2. Subword Tokenization (Byte Pair Encoding - BPE, WordPiece, etc.) - Used in models like GPT and BERT. - Breaks words into smaller frequent subunits to optimize the vocabulary size. - Example with BPE:
- Input: *“neurosurgery”*
- Tokens: `[“neuro”, “surgery”]`
#### 3. Character Tokenization - Breaks text into individual characters, useful for languages with long words or no spaces (e.g., Chinese, Japanese). - Example:
- Input: *“ChatGPT”*
- Tokens: `[“C”, “h”, “a”, “t”, “G”, “P”, “T”]`
#### 4. Sentence Tokenization (Phrase-based Tokenization) - Segments text into full sentences instead of individual words. - Example:
- Input: *“How are you? Everything is fine!”*
- Tokens: `[“How are you?”, “Everything is fine!”]`
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### Tokenization in Language Models - GPT-4 uses a variation of Byte Pair Encoding (BPE), which splits words into frequent subunits to optimize vocabulary size and efficiency. - BERT uses WordPiece, another subword-based method that breaks down words into common segments.
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### Example in Python (Using NLTK and SpaCy)
You can test tokenization in Python using NLTK or SpaCy:
#### NLTK Tokenization ```python import nltk from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize
nltk.download('punkt') # Download tokenizer model text = “The neurosurgeon performs a complex surgery.” tokens = word_tokenize(text)
print(tokens) # Output: ['The', 'neurosurgeon', 'performs', 'a', 'complex', 'surgery', '.'] ```
#### SpaCy Tokenization ```python import spacy nlp = spacy.load(“en_core_web_sm”)
text = “The neurosurgeon performs a complex surgery.” tokens = [token.text for token in nlp(text)]
print(tokens) ```
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### Applications of Tokenization - Machine Translation (e.g., Google Translate) - Sentiment Analysis - Search and Information Retrieval - Language Models like ChatGPT - Named Entity Recognition (NER)