Tokenoida

Tokenoida is a Finnish verb meaning to apply tokenization. In information technology, it refers to transforming data into tokens or replacing sensitive data with non-sensitive placeholders, with the mapping kept in a secure repository. The term is used in natural language processing as well as in data security and payment processing, and is sometimes contrasted with encryption and hashing.

In natural language processing, tokenoiminen or tokenization means breaking text into discrete units called tokens, such as words, punctuation, or subword units. Tokenization is a common preprocessing step for downstream tasks like parsing, sequence labeling, or language modeling. Different strategies exist: word-level tokenization, subword tokenization (Byte Pair Encoding, WordPiece, SentencePiece), and character-level tokenization. The choice affects model performance and vocabulary size.

In data security, tokenoida describes replacing sensitive data (for example a credit card number) with a surrogate token that maps back to the original value only within a secure token vault. Tokenization reduces the exposure of sensitive data and can simplify regulatory compliance, since tokens should have no exploitable value outside the vault. Tokens are usually non-deterministic or reversible only to the extent allowed by the vault's security controls; they are not encryption and do not provide confidentiality by themselves if the vault is compromised.

Limitations include dependence on the tokenization system, potential re-identification risks if mappings leak, and the need for secure vault management. See also tokenization, data masking, PCI DSS, NLP tokenization.