TextBrewer: An Open-Source Knowledge Distillation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing

In this paper, we introduce TextBrewer, an open-source knowledge distillation toolkit designed for natural language processing. It works with different neural network models and supports various kinds of tasks, such as text classification, reading comprehension, sequence labeling. TextBrewer provides a simple and uniform workflow that enables quick setup of distillation experiments with highly flexible configurations. It offers a set of predefined distillation methods and can be extended with custom code. As a case study, we use TextBrewer to distill BERT on several typical NLP tasks. With simple configuration, we achieve results that are comparable with or even higher than the state-of-the-art performance. Our toolkit is available through: http://textbrewer.hfl-rc.com