Classification is essential for tasks below the level of the document as well. We've already seen period disambiguation (deciding if a period is the end of a sentence or part of a word), and word tokenization (deciding if a character should be a word boundary). Even language modeling can be viewed as classification: each word can be thought of as a class, and so predicting the next word is classifying the context-so-far into a class for each next word. A part-of-speech tagger (Chapter 8) classifies each occurrence of a word in a sentence as, e.g., a noun or a verb.