lingestion

Lingestion is a term that appears sporadically in discussions of language, cognition, and data processing. It is not a widely standardized concept, and its exact meaning can vary by field. Broadly, lingestion can be described as the intake of linguistic input by a system—human or machine—with the aim of learning, understanding, or using language. It is distinct from the physical act of ingestion of food and from internal cognitive operations, though it overlaps with how input is acquired.

In human language acquisition, lingestion is sometimes used metaphorically to refer to the exposure to language that supports learning, such as listening to speech or reading text. In computational settings, lingestion often denotes the data ingestion phase, where raw text or speech data are collected, cleaned, and converted into a suitable form for downstream processing, model training, or analysis. This can involve steps like normalization, tokenization, and metadata tagging.

Because the term lacks a single formal definition, its usage can be ambiguous. When used, it is advisable to specify the exact sense—whether referring to biological learning or to data handling for NLP models—and to distinguish lingestion from related processes such as encoding, interpretation, or data processing. See also ingestion, language acquisition, data ingestion, natural language processing.