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Byte pair encoding
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<p>Byte pair encoding (also known as BPE, or digram coding) is an algorithm, first described in 1994 by Philip Gage, for encoding strings of text into smaller strings by creating and using a translation table. A slightly-modified version of the algorithm is used in <a href="/facts/Large_language_model/WnogWVJY">large language model</a> tokenizers. </p><p>The original version of the algorithm focused on compression. It replaces the highest-frequency pair of <a href="/facts/Byte/BNHUp9Qq">bytes</a> with a new byte that was not contained in the initial dataset. A <a href="/facts/Lookup_table/ULPEAGTJ">lookup table</a> of the replacements is required to rebuild the initial dataset. The modified version builds "tokens" (units of recognition) that match varying amounts of source text, from single characters (including single digits or single punctuation marks) to whole words (even long compound words). </p>