From Characters to Context: Tokenization in LLMs

Mori
7 min readMay 13, 2024
OpenAI tokenizer

Tokenization is a crucial step in natural language processing (NLP), where we break down text into smaller units (tokens) for further analysis. In this article, we’ll explore various tokenization techniques, their pros and cons, and practical tips for implementing them in Python.

You can find the code used in this post below 👇

Contents

1. Introduction to Tokenization
2. Basic Tokenization Techniques
3. Advanced Tokenization Methods
4. Handling Special Cases
5. Tokenization in Pretrained LLMs
6. Tips for Efficient Tokenization

1. Introduction to Tokenization

In this section, we’ll explore the basics of tokenization, its importance for large language models (LLMs), and the difference between tokenization and word segmentation.

What is Tokenization?

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Mori
Mori

Written by Mori

Date Scientist/Machine Learning Engineer | Passionate about solving real-world problems | PhD in Computer Science