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IBM AI Fundamentals: Unraveling the Building Blocks of Natural Language Processing

Discover the crucial role of tokens in natural language processing and how they help computers break down unstructured information for efficient analysis and understanding.

Table of Contents

Question

When handling unstructured information, computers begin with one sentence at a time using sentence segmentation. Computers then break the information into smaller chunks that can be individually classified and sorted into a structure for natural language processing to work with them.

Which of the following is the term used to refer to those smaller chunks?

A. Entities
B. Sentiments
C. Intents
D. Tokens

Answer

D. Tokens

Explanation

Once the sentences are segmented, the information is broken into smaller chunks of information called tokens. Tokens are discrete units of information that can be individually classified.

When computers process unstructured information, such as natural language text, they begin by breaking it down into smaller, manageable units called tokens. Tokenization is a fundamental step in natural language processing (NLP) that enables computers to analyze and understand the meaning behind the text.

The process starts with sentence segmentation, where the computer identifies individual sentences within a given text. Once the sentences are identified, the computer further breaks them down into tokens. Tokens are the smallest meaningful units of text, typically consisting of individual words, punctuation marks, or special characters.

For example, consider the sentence: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” After tokenization, the sentence would be split into the following tokens: [“The”, “quick”, “brown”, “fox”, “jumps”, “over”, “the”, “lazy”, “dog”, “.”]

By breaking the text into tokens, computers can more easily classify and sort the information into a structured format that NLP algorithms can work with. This structure allows the computer to analyze the text, extract relevant information, and derive meaning from it.

Other options mentioned in the question, such as entities, sentiments, and intents, are also important concepts in NLP but serve different purposes:

  • Entities refer to specific objects, people, places, or concepts mentioned in the text.
  • Sentiments relate to the emotional tone or attitude expressed in the text.
  • Intents represent the underlying purpose or goal of the text, such as a request, command, or question.

In summary, tokens are the smaller chunks of text that computers use to break down unstructured information during the process of natural language processing. Tokenization is a crucial step that enables computers to analyze, classify, and derive meaning from natural language text efficiently.

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