DecodeAI
NLP Fundamentals
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Tokenization & Text Representations

From words to subwords — tradeoffs that affect every NLP system.

Cheatsheet — Tokenization

  • Vocab size ↔ sequence length tradeoff
  • Special tokens: CLS, SEP, PAD, MASK
  • Always preprocess train and prod identically
  • Watch multilingual / code-switching edge cases