Is there a difference between Vectorization and Featurization?
It's hard to say for sure without having the article in hand.  At risk of putting words in the author's mouth, I would guess that the two terms do mean the same thing if they are being used interchangeably.  Featurization is a common-ish term for feature engineering or feature extraction.  In that context,  you typically start with some low-level, noisy representation of the data, then pass it through some algorithm to transform it into a &quot;feature vector&quot; (a high-level representation of the data).  So I guess it might be tempting to call that process &quot;vectorization&quot; as well.  Once again, hard to say for sure without taking a look at the article.
Outside of a given article, I would not want to use them interchangeably.  Usually &quot;vectorization&quot; refers to modifying an operation so that it works with vectors rather than scalars.  (this is what numpy.ndarray is all about).