Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE)

Byte-Pair Encoding is an algorithm that starts with individual characters and iteratively combines the most frequently occurring adjacent pairs into new tokens. It operates by first tokenizing text into individual characters then counting frequency of adjacent pairs merging the most common pair into a new token and repeating until a desired vocabulary size is reached. This creates a subword vocabulary that can effectively handle rare words and morphological variants.

Text preprocessing for language models Machine translation systems Token optimization in transformers Handling multilingual text data