betweenword

Betweenword is a term used in linguistics and natural language processing to describe the boundary region between adjacent words in written text. It refers to the space, punctuation, or other separators that signal the end of one word and the start of the next. As a concept, betweenword is not a visible unit in most scripts, but a functional one that influences how text is tokenized and analyzed.

Origin and scope: the term emerged in discussions of word segmentation and tokenization, especially in multilingual and mixed-script corpora. It is used to discuss the challenge of identifying where one word ends and another begins, including in languages that use whitespace, punctuation, or no explicit separators.

Language-specific considerations: in languages that write with spaces (for example, English), the betweenword region is typically the whitespace character or punctuation that separates tokens. In languages with no explicit word boundaries (such as Chinese or Thai), models treat betweenword as a latent boundary that must be inferred from context and character sequences.

Computational representation and use: in NLP pipelines, betweenword can be represented as a boundary token, a feature in a classifier, or a probabilistic boundary location. It informs tokenization, dictionary matching, and grammars, and it is used to evaluate tokenizer quality and segmentation accuracy.

Limitations and discussion: betweenword is a descriptive concept rather than an official standard. Its usefulness depends on the task, language, and annotation scheme. Related concepts include word boundaries, tokenization, sentence segmentation, and boundary detection.