Token

In the context of large language models (LLMs) and natural language processing (NLP), a token is the most fundamental unit of text that the model processes. This unit can vary significantly depending on the tokenization strategy employed; it might represent an entire word, a subword (like "un-" in "unhappy"), a single character, or even a punctuation mark. The process of breaking down raw text into these discrete tokens, known as tokenization, is a critical preprocessing step before any text can be fed into an LLM for analysis or generation.