---
title: "morpheme"
type: concept
related: [Morpheme, Tokenization]
source: https://www.jemoka.com/posts/kbhmorpheme/
confidence: high
status: active
---

A morpheme is the smallest meaning-bearing unit of a language. &ldquo;er&rdquo;, or &ldquo;ist&rdquo;, etc. It contains:
stems: core meaning-bearing units, and affexes: parts that adhere to stems For non space-delineated languages, tokenization happens with morpheme (&ldquo;词&rdquo;).
Consider:
姚明进入总决赛
Is yao/ming first and last names seperated. Is zong combined with juesai? (i.e. ADJ vs. NOUN).
Commonly, Chinese performs word level tokenization if you don&rsquo;t want to deal with it. Typically, this usuals neural sequence models.
