Lisa Notes

Jun 21, 2026 · Artificial Intelligence

Understanding Byte Pair Encoding (BPE): A Greedy Subword Compression Algorithm for NLP

The article explains how Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) works as a greedy, linear‑time subword segmentation technique, walks through its step‑by‑step token merging process with a concrete sentence example, discusses its strengths in handling OOV words, and outlines its limitations and alternatives such as WordPiece and SentencePiece.