Word segmentation (natural language processing) is the computational process within natural language processing and computational linguistics concerned with identifying the boundaries between linguistic units corresponding to words in a sequence of text or speech. This fundamental task involves determining where one word ends and the next begins, which is straightforward in languages using clear delimiters like spaces but presents significant challenges in languages lacking such explicit markers (e.g., Chinese, Japanese, Thai). Accurate word segmentation is a critical prerequisite for numerous downstream NLP applications, including parsing, machine translation, information retrieval, and text analysis.