# Token Alignment

> Source: https://sukruyusufkaya.com/en/glossary/token-alignment
> Updated: 2026-05-13T19:59:51.347Z
> Type: glossary
> Category: dogal-dil-isleme
**TLDR:** The problem of preserving the mapping between subword tokens and original word or span structures.

<p>Token alignment becomes critical especially in NER, span extraction, and document-processing tasks. Outputs produced at the subword level must be mapped back to word-level or field-level units that are meaningful to humans. Poor alignment can make even a correct model appear wrong. For that reason, tokenization is not only an input issue, but also an output interpretation issue.</p>