---

TextBox 2.0 (妙笔)

“李太白少时，梦所用之笔头上生花后天才赡逸，名闻天下。”——王仁裕《开元天宝遗事·梦笔头生花》

TextBox 2.0: A Text Generation Library with Pre-trained Language Models

TextBox 2.0 is an up-to-date text generation library based on Python and PyTorch focusing on building a unified and standardized pipeline for applying pre-trained language models to text generation:

• From a task perspective, we consider 13 common text generation tasks such as translation, story generation, and style transfer, and their corresponding 83 widely-used datasets.
• From a model perspective, we incorporate 47 pre-trained language models/modules covering the categories of general, translation, Chinese, dialogue, controllable, distilled, prompting, and lightweight models (modules).
• From a training perspective, we support 4 pre-training objectives and 4 efficient and robust training strategies, such as distributed data parallel and efficient generation.

Compared with the previous version of TextBox, this extension mainly focuses on building a unified, flexible, and standardized framework for better supporting PLM-based text generation models. There are three advantages of TextBox 2.0:

• It is a significant innovation focusing on comprehensive tasks and PLMs.
• It is designed to be unified in implementation and interface.
• It can faithfully reproduce the results reported in existing work.

The Overall Framework of TextBox 2.0

Installation

Considering that a modified version of transformers will be installed, it is recommended to create a new conda environment:

conda create -n TextBox python=3.8

Then, you can clone our repository and install it with one-click.

git clone https://github.com/RUCAIBox/TextBox.git && cd TextBox
bash install.sh

If you face a issue ROUGE-1.5.5.pl - XML::Parser dependency error when installing files2rouge, you can refer to this issue.

Quick Start

This is a script template to run TextBox 2.0 in an end-to-end pipeline:

python run_textbox.py --model=<model-name> --dataset=<dataset-name> --model_path=<hf-or-local-path>

Substitute --model=<xxx> , --dataset=<xxx> and --model_path=<xxx> with your choices.

The choices of model and model_path can be found in Model. We provide the detailed instruction of each model in that page.

The choices of dataset can be found in Dataset. You should download the dataset at https://huggingface.co/RUCAIBox and put the downloaded dataset under the dataset folder just like samsum. If your want to use your own dataset, please refer to here.

The script below will run the Facebook BART-base model on the samsum dataset:

python run_textbox.py --model=BART --dataset=samsum --model_path=facebook/bart-base

Training

Basic Training

For basic training, we provide a detailed tutorial (here) for setting commonly used parameters like optimizer, scheduler, validation frequency, early stopping, and so on.

Pre-training

TextBox 2.0 provides four pre-training objectives to help users pre-train a model from scratch, including language modeling, masked sequence-to-sequence modeling, denoising auto-encoding, and masked span prediction. See the pre-training doc for a detailed tutorial.

Efficient Training

Four useful training methods are provided for improving the optimization of PLMs: distributed data parallel, efficient decoding, hyper-parameter optimization, and repeated experiments. Detailed instructions are provided here.

Model

To support the rapid progress of PLMs on text generation, TextBox 2.0 incorporates 47 models/modules, covering the categories of general, translation, Chinese, dialogue, controllable, distilled, prompting, and lightweight models (modules). See the model doc for information on detailed usage instructions of each model, pre-trained model parameters, and generation parameters.

Dataset

Now we support 13 generation tasks (e.g., translation and story generation) and their corresponding 83 datasets. We also provide the description, basic statistics, training/validation/testing samples, and leaderboard for each dataset. See more details here.

Evaluation

TextBox 2.0 supports 17 automatic metrics of 4 categories and several visualization tools to explore and analyze the generated texts in various dimensions. For evaluation details, see the evaluation doc.

Releases

Releases	Date	Features
v2.0.1	24/12/2022	TextBox 2.0
v2.0.0	20/08/2022	TextBox 2.0 Beta
v0.2.1	15/04/2021	TextBox
v0.1.5	01/11/2021	Basic TextBox

Contributing

Please let us know if you encounter a bug or have any suggestions by filing an issue.

We welcome all contributions from bug fixes to new features and extensions.

We expect all contributions discussed in the issue tracker and going through PRs.

We thank @LucasTsui0725 for contributing HRED model and several evaluation metrics.

We thank @wxDai for contributing PointerNet and more than 20 language models in transformers API.

The Team

TextBox is developed and maintained by AI Box.

License

TextBox uses MIT License.

Reference

If you find TextBox 2.0 useful for your research or development, please cite the following papers:

@inproceedings{tang-etal-2022-textbox,
    title = "{T}ext{B}ox 2.0: A Text Generation Library with Pre-trained Language Models",
    author = "Tang, Tianyi  and  Li, Junyi  and  Chen, Zhipeng  and  Hu, Yiwen  and  Yu, Zhuohao  and  Dai, Wenxun  and  Zhao, Wayne Xin  and  Nie, Jian-yun  and  Wen, Ji-rong",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the The 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations",
    month = dec,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-demos.42",
    pages = "435--444",
}


@inproceedings{textbox,
    title = "{T}ext{B}ox: A Unified, Modularized, and Extensible Framework for Text Generation",
    author = "Li, Junyi  and  Tang, Tianyi  and  He, Gaole  and  Jiang, Jinhao  and  Hu, Xiaoxuan  and  Xie, Puzhao  and  Chen, Zhipeng  and  Yu, Zhuohao  and  Zhao, Wayne Xin  and  Wen, Ji-Rong",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations",
    month = aug,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-demo.4",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.acl-demo.4",
    pages = "30--39",
}