The Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) Algorithm is a very useful algorithm with several applications
Initially it was used as a lossless Data Compression method
In Natural Language Processing, BPE is used to tokenize text data efficiently
Purpose is to break text into subwords or units that allow for flexibility in handling unknown words and dealing with languages that have complex morphology
How does it work
Given a training corpus of text it’ll find the sequence of words that appear most commonly together and then it’d group them based on highest -> lowest frequency. You can use this dictionary of grouped characters / words to tokenize input text.
This helps LLMs better understand meaning of the text
Resources
Youtube Link: https://youtu.be/tOMjTCO0htA?si=IPlpX_xQQluubTjk
Wikipedia Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_pair_encoding