AI engineering glossary · NLP embeddings

What is token?

Token (also called Text token): The smallest unit of text a language system treats as one piece after splitting. Depending on the method, a token can be a whole word, part of a word, a single character or a punctuation mark. Models never see raw text; they see sequences of tokens converted to numbers.

Level: beginnerTopic: NLP embeddings

Token: an example

The sentence "Unhappiness is rare" might become the tokens ["un", "happiness", "is", "rare"] under a subword tokeniser.

Related terms

More NLP embeddings terms

Where you learn it

Token is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.

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