What is "w-shingling"

n. (context computing English) In natural language processing, a set of unique "shingles" (contiguous subsequences of tokens in a document) that can be used to gauge the similarity of documents.

In natural language processing a w-shingling is a set of unique "shingles" ( n-grams, contiguous subsequences of tokens in a document) that can be used to gauge the similarity of two documents. The w denotes the number of tokens in each shingle in the set.

The document, "a rose is a rose is a rose" can be tokenized as follows:

(a,rose,is,a,rose,is,a,rose)

The set of all contiguous sequences of 4 tokens (4-grams) is

{ (a,rose,is,a), (rose,is,a,rose), (is,a,rose,is), (a,rose,is,a), (rose,is,a,rose) } = { (a,rose,is,a), (rose,is,a,rose), (is,a,rose,is) }