endofword

Endofword is a term used to describe the boundary that marks the end of a word within a sequence of characters or tokens. In different fields, endofword may refer to an explicit marker inserted to signal word termination or to the general concept of a word boundary in processing text data. The idea is to distinguish where one word ends and the next begins, which can aid analysis, annotation, or model learning.

In linguistics and orthography, word boundaries are usually realized by spaces or punctuation, and sometimes by prosodic or morphological cues. An explicit endofword marker can be added in annotated corpora or certain computational tasks to facilitate segmentation, especially for languages with limited or unclear spacing, or for experimental purposes in processing pipelines. Endofword markers are more common in computational contexts than in ordinary writing.

In natural language processing and related fields, endofword markers appear in some tokenization schemes and character-level models. They can be represented by special tokens such as <EOW> or similar symbols to indicate the end of a word within a sequence. This can help models learn word-level information while operating on a character stream, or support subword and dictionary-based approaches.

The form and usage of endofword markers vary by dataset and framework; there is no universal standard. Endofword is distinct from end-of-sentence markers and other boundary concepts, and is primarily a tool for annotation, modeling, and text processing rather than a fixed linguistic rule. See also: end-of-sentence, word boundary, tokenization, morphological segmentation.