The document discusses the lexical analysis phase of a compiler. In lexical analysis, the source code is divided into tokens. Common token types include keywords, identifiers, and special symbols. Lexical analyzers perform pattern matching and techniques used for lexical analysis can also be applied to other areas like query languages. Lex is a tool that can generate an automaton recognizer for regular expressions to specify lexical analyzers. The role of a lexical analyzer is to read input characters and produce a sequence of tokens for the parser to use in syntax analysis.