Author Interview - Typical Decoding for Natural Language Generation

Explore an in-depth interview with Clara Meister, the first author of a paper introducing "typical sampling" - a new decoding method for natural language generation. Learn about the challenges of generating interesting text from modern language models and how typical sampling offers a principled solution. Discover the connections between this approach and psycholinguistic theories of human speech generation. Gain insights into why high-probability text can often seem dull, and how typical sampling aims to balance generating high-probability and high-information samples. Examine experimental results comparing typical sampling to other methods like top-k and nucleus sampling. Delve into discussions on training objectives, arbitrary engineering choices, and how to get started implementing this technique.

- Intro
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- Why does sampling matter?
- What is a "typical" message?
- How do humans communicate?
- Why don't we just sample from the model's distribution?
- What happens if we condition on the information to transmit?
- Does typical sampling really represent human outputs?
- What do the plots mean?
- Diving into the experimental results
- Are our training objectives wrong?
- Comparing typical sampling to top-k and nucleus sampling
- Explaining arbitrary engineering choices
- How can people get started with this?