Regularized Training of Nearest Neighbor Language Models

Including memory banks in a natural language processing architecture increases model capacity by equipping it with additional data at inference time. In this paper, we build upon kNN-LM, which uses a pre-trained language model together with an exhaustive kNN search through the training data (memory bank) to achieve state-of-the-art results. We investigate whether we can improve the kNN-LM performance by instead training a LM with the knowledge that we will be using a kNN post-hoc. We achieved significant improvement using our method on language modeling tasks on WIKI-2 and WIKI-103. The main…