K-best lists can be extracted by extensions of the argmax inference algorithm for many models: the K-best Viterbi algorithm (Golod, 2009) for Hidden Markov Models (Rabiner, 1989) and Conditional Random Fields (Lafferty et al., 2001), K-best Maximum Spanning Tree (MST) algorithms for graph-based dependency parsing (Camerini et al., 1980;Hall, 2007), and so forth.
the members of K-best lists are typically quite similar to each other and do not substantially deviate from the argmax solution of the model.