A bunch of questions/remarks from a newbie

[pmichel31415]

Hi, here's a list of questions I have. None of them warrant a separate issue, but clarifying those would help new users such as myself

• [x] How do I force the overwrite of the log file? The error message isn't very clear please delete by hand if you want to overwrite it (or use --settings debug or otherwise set OVERWRITE_LOG=True) (what is the OVERWRITE_LOG variable and where can I change it?)
• [ ] The documentation on the translator structure (http://xnmt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/translator_structure.html) is a bit terse. For instance I had trouble figuring out what an MlpSoftmaxDecoder was. Something that would help is to describe a common baseline model (with equations/diagrams and everything) and then show a config file where all the parameters are specified that reproduces it
• [x] Errors in the doc/examples (I think):
  • in http://xnmt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/experiment_config_files.html#model adding a layers argument to the MlpSoftmaxDecoder doesn't work for me
  • https://github.com/neulab/xnmt/blob/master/recipes/stanford-iwslt/config.en-vi.yaml#L20-L21 passing a beam argument to SimpleInference raises an error ValueError: 'beam' is not a accepted argument of SimpleInference.__init__(). Valid are ['src_file', 'trg_file', 'ref_file', 'max_src_len', 'post_process', 'report_path', 'report_type', 'search_strategy', 'mode', 'max_len', 'batcher']
  • The docstring for this class http://xnmt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api_doc.html#xnmt.length_normalization.LengthNormalization seems to be wrong
  • probably others I didn't find. IMO the outdated API in the examples is a bigger problem than wrong docstrings
• [x] In the API reference it would be nice if the base class were located before the inherited classes (not sure if there's a way to enforce this with sphinx)
• [x] Can I overwrite EXP_DIR in the config file to point to a directory of my choice?
• [x] How do I set the random seed for everything (for reproducibility)

I will update if I run into more issues.

PS: I'm using the latest master

[msperber]

Thanks for finding these! re 1: as of #345, this is documented under xnmt/settings.py re 3: thanks for catching these; fixed as of #345 re 4: also not sure, but I did add show-inheritance flags so we can at least follow the link to the base class re 5: I hadn't thought about this, but turns out you can: simply overwrite EXP_DIR in the experiment.exp_global.placeholders dictionary. Or, adjust it in xnmt.settings to change locations for all experiments you run. re 6: --dynet-seed changes seeds for both dynet and XNMT.

[pmichel31415]

Thanks for the quick response @msperber I'll still leave this open for the translator structure documentation part

[neubig]

I think the documentation has been improved significantly, so maybe we can close this?