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Word Tokenizer and Vocabulary

Split text into lowercase words and build a vocabulary sorted by frequency, the first step of any language model.

What you'll learn

  • Split text into lowercase word tokens
  • Count word frequencies
  • Sort a vocabulary by frequency, then alphabetically

Problem

Language models work with tokens, not raw text. A simple tokenizer lowercases the text and treats every run of letters a-z and digits 0-9 as a word; everything else (spaces, punctuation, other characters) separates words.

Build the vocabulary: the distinct words, sorted by how often they appear (most frequent first), with ties broken alphabetically. A word's position in this list is its token ID.

Implement build_vocabulary(text).

Input

text: Any text.

Output

Return the vocabulary as a list of words. Return an empty list if the text has no words.

Constraints

0 ≤ length of text ≤ 100,000

Examples

Example 1
Input:
text = "The cat sat on the mat. The end!"

Expected output:
expected = ["the", "cat", "end", "mat", "on", "sat"]
Input:
std::string text = "The cat sat on the mat. The end!";

Expected output:
std::vector<std::string> expected = {"the", "cat", "end", "mat", "on", "sat"};
Input:
string text = "The cat sat on the mat. The end!";

Expected output:
string[] expected = new string[] {"the", "cat", "end", "mat", "on", "sat"};

Explanation

Lowercased, the words are the, cat, sat, on, the, mat, the, end. "the" appears 3 times; the rest appear once and are sorted alphabetically: ["the", "cat", "end", "mat", "on", "sat"].

Example 2
Input:
text = "AI, ai and A.I. (2024)"

Expected output:
expected = ["ai", "2024", "a", "and", "i"]
Input:
std::string text = "AI, ai and A.I. (2024)";

Expected output:
std::vector<std::string> expected = {"ai", "2024", "a", "and", "i"};
Input:
string text = "AI, ai and A.I. (2024)";

Expected output:
string[] expected = new string[] {"ai", "2024", "a", "and", "i"};

Explanation

Words: ai, ai, and, a, i, 2024. "ai" appears twice; the others once, sorted alphabetically with digits before letters: ["ai", "2024", "a", "and", "i"].

References

This challenge is adapted for CodeUtility. Follow the statement and constraints above.

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