Could you explain the concept of Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) in natural language processing? Describe how BPE works as a subword tokenization technique, including the process of merging byte pairs, handling out-of-vocabulary words, and its application in text compression and language modeling. Additionally, discuss the trade-offs associated with using BPE compared to other tokenization methods and its effectiveness in capturing morphological variations and handling rare words in different languages.

Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) is a popular algorithm used in natural language processing (NLP) for subword tokenization. Its primary goal is to segment words into smaller units, often subword tokens, to handle out-of-vocabulary words, **improve the representation...