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/*******************************************************************************
 * Copyright (c) 2010-2020 Haifeng Li. All rights reserved.
 *
 * Smile is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
 * it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as
 * published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of
 * the License, or (at your option) any later version.
 *
 * Smile is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
 * GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.
 *
 * You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License
 * along with Smile.  If not, see .
 ******************************************************************************/

package smile.nlp.tokenizer;

/**
 * A token is a string of characters, categorized according to the rules as a
 * symbol. The process of forming tokens from an input stream of characters
 * is called tokenization.
 * 
 * This is not as easy as it sounds. For example, when should a token containing
 * a hypen be split into two or more tokens? When does a period indicate the
 * end of an abbreviation as opposed to a sentence or a number or a
 * Roman numeral? Sometimes a period can act as a sentence terminator and
 * an abbreviation terminator at the same time. When should a single quote be
 * split from a word?
 *
 * @author Haifeng Li
 */
public interface Tokenizer {
    /**
     * Splits the string into a list of tokens.
     */
    String[] split(String text);
}