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Tokenization in LLMs

— Mejbah Ahammad

Tokenization in LLMs
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Tokenization in LLMs

Question: What is tokenization in Large Language Models (LLMs), and why is it important?

Answer: Tokenization is the process of splitting text into smaller units called tokens, which can be words, subwords, or even individual characters. It is crucial for LLMs because:

  • It enables the model to process text efficiently.
  • Subword tokenization helps handle out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words by breaking them into known parts.
  • Smaller tokens allow the model to generalize better across different languages and contexts.
1 from transformers import AutoTokenizer
2 # Load a pre-trained tokenizer
3 tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained('bert-base-uncased')
4 # Tokenize a sentence
5 tokens = tokenizer.tokenize("Tokenization is important.")
6 # Convert tokens to input IDs
7 input_ids = tokenizer.convert_tokens_to_ids(tokens)