def _tokenize(self, text):
        """Tokenizes a piece of text."""
        text = self._clean_text(text)

        # This was added on November 1st, 2018 for the multilingual and Chinese
        # models. This is also applied to the English models now, but it doesn't
        # matter since the English models were not trained on any Chinese data
        # and generally don't have any Chinese data in them (there are Chinese
        # characters in the vocabulary because Wikipedia does have some Chinese
        # words in the English Wikipedia.).
        text = self._tokenize_chinese_chars(text)
        orig_tokens = self._whitespace_tokenize(text)
        split_tokens = []
        for token in orig_tokens:
            if self.lower:
                token = token.lower()
                token = self._run_strip_accents(token)
            split_tokens.extend(self._run_split_on_punc(token))

        output_tokens = self._whitespace_tokenize(' '.join(split_tokens))
        return output_tokens