Token Type | Description | Use Cases | Examples |
Word Tokens | Represent individual words in the text | Language modeling, text generation, machine translation | Example: "cat," "dog," "house" |
Subword Tokens | Represent smaller text units like subwords | Handling complex word structures, text generation | Example: "un-" (as in "undo"), "happi" (from "happiness") |
Character Tokens | Represent individual characters in the text | Text generation, handwriting recognition, OCR | Example: "A," "b," "7" |
Byte Tokens | Treat each byte of text as a separate token | Text encoding, binary data analysis | Example: "01011010," "1A," "FF" |
Special Tokens | Used for various purposes (e.g., [CLS], [SEP]) | Start/end markers, padding, segment separation | Example: [CLS] (classification start), [SEP] (sequence separation) |
Position Tokens | Indicate the position of tokens in a sequence | Transformer models for positional awareness | Example: [POS_1], [POS_2], [POS_3] |
Mask Tokens | Mask out tokens to be ignored in operations | Masked language modeling, information retrieval | Example: [MASK], [PAD] |
Entity Tokens | Represent recognized entities in the text | Named entity recognition (NER), information extraction | Example: [ORG], [PERSON], [LOCATION] |
Image Tokens | Represent image features or captions | Multimodal models, image-text interaction | Example: [IMG_FEATURES], [CAPTION] |
Custom Tokens | Domain-specific tokens for specific tasks | Code generation, medical text analysis, specialized NLP | Example: [FUNCTION], [DIAGNOSIS], [LAW] |
Comments