BPE
No estimate
No hardware requirements for this model
The weights for this model have not been published, so it cannot be downloaded or run on your own hardware at any size. It is reachable only through its provider, and no graphics card changes that.
On record
Full specification
Everything on record for this model. Most of it describes how it was trained rather than how it runs — useful context for judging how much work went into it, and how it compares with models built at a different scale.
Origin
Who built this model, where, and when it was published.
- Organisation
- University of Edinburgh
- Organisation type
- Academia
- Country
- United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
- Published
- 31 August 2015
- Authors
- R Sennrich, B Haddow, A Birch
What it does
The problem areas the model was built for. A model can carry several of each.
- Domain
- Language
- Task
- Translation
Size
How large the model is and how much data it was trained on. Parameters are the figure that decides whether it fits on a given graphics card.
- Training data
- 50,000,000 tokens
[WORDS] "We perform experiments on data from the shared translation task of WMT 2015. For English→German, our training set consists of 4.2 million sentence pairs, or approximately 100 million tokens. For English→Russian, the training set consists of 2.6 million sentence pairs, or approximately 50 million tokens" 100M tokens, around half will be in English, 0.75 words per token
How it is classified
Labels the source dataset applies when tracking notable models, and how confident it is in the entry.
- Why it is tracked
- Highly cited
- Citations
- 8,685
Sources
Where this record came from and when it was last checked.
- Reference
- Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units
- Last updated
- 25 May 2026
What the numbers mean
Where it came from
BPE was published by University of Edinburgh, in United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, in August 2015. It comes out of academia.
It works in Language, and is recorded as doing translation.
Because the weights are not available, none of the hardware figures elsewhere on this site apply to it.
How it was trained
Around 50,000,000 tokens went into training it.
The reason it appears in this catalogue at all is highly cited.
Answers
BPE — common questions
Who created BPE?
BPE was published by University of Edinburgh, based in United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, categorised as academia.
When was BPE released?
BPE was published in August 2015. Capability per parameter has improved considerably since, so a newer model of the same size is often the better use of the same hardware.
What is BPE used for?
BPE works in Language, and is recorded as handling translation. These are the areas it was designed around; they describe intent rather than a hard boundary.
What GPU do I need to run BPE?
None. BPE is a closed model — its weights were never published, so it cannot be downloaded or run on your own hardware at any price. It is reachable only through its provider.
Is BPE open source?
The licensing for BPE was never recorded in our source data. We treat unstated licensing as closed, because an unrecorded licence is not one to rely on.
How many parameters does BPE have?
No parameter count has been published for BPE, which is why no memory or speed figure appears on this page.
The other direction
Looking at it from the other side?
This page starts from the model. If you already own a card and want to know everything it will run, start from the hardware instead.