Tokenization is the process of splitting text into meaningful elements called tokens, which may be words, phrases, or symbols. This is an essential step in natural language processing as it helps in transforming textual information into a format that can be more easily analyzed. For example, the sentence "The cat sat" would typically be tokenized into three tokens: "The," "cat," and "sat." This allows each word to be analyzed separately for sentiment, syntax, or semantic meaning.