kNN-BOX: A Unified Framework for Nearest Neighbor Generation
This provides a tool for researchers and practitioners to quickly implement and analyze kNN-based generation methods, but it is incremental as it builds on existing paradigms.
The authors tackled the problem of developing and analyzing nearest neighbor generation methods by introducing kNN-BOX, a unified framework that decomposes datastore-augmentation into modules, and it led to large performance improvements in machine translation and other seq2seq tasks.
Augmenting the base neural model with a token-level symbolic datastore is a novel generation paradigm and has achieved promising results in machine translation (MT). In this paper, we introduce a unified framework kNN-BOX, which enables quick development and interactive analysis for this novel paradigm. kNN-BOX decomposes the datastore-augmentation approach into three modules: datastore, retriever and combiner, thus putting diverse kNN generation methods into a unified way. Currently, kNN-BOX has provided implementation of seven popular kNN-MT variants, covering research from performance enhancement to efficiency optimization. It is easy for users to reproduce these existing works or customize their own models. Besides, users can interact with their kNN generation systems with kNN-BOX to better understand the underlying inference process in a visualized way. In the experiment section, we apply kNN-BOX for machine translation and three other seq2seq generation tasks, namely, text simplification, paraphrase generation and question generation. Experiment results show that augmenting the base neural model with kNN-BOX leads to a large performance improvement in all these tasks. The code and document of kNN-BOX is available at https://github.com/NJUNLP/knn-box.