DefSent: Sentence Embeddings using Definition Sentences

Hayato Tsukagoshi, Ryohei Sasano, Koichi Takeda


Abstract
Sentence embedding methods using natural language inference (NLI) datasets have been successfully applied to various tasks. However, these methods are only available for limited languages due to relying heavily on the large NLI datasets. In this paper, we propose DefSent, a sentence embedding method that uses definition sentences from a word dictionary, which performs comparably on unsupervised semantics textual similarity (STS) tasks and slightly better on SentEval tasks than conventional methods. Since dictionaries are available for many languages, DefSent is more broadly applicable than methods using NLI datasets without constructing additional datasets. We demonstrate that DefSent performs comparably on unsupervised semantics textual similarity (STS) tasks and slightly better on SentEval tasks to the methods using large NLI datasets. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/hpprc/defsent.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-short.52
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
411–418
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-short.52
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-short.52
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hayato Tsukagoshi, Ryohei Sasano, and Koichi Takeda. 2021. DefSent: Sentence Embeddings using Definition Sentences. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 411–418, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DefSent: Sentence Embeddings using Definition Sentences (Tsukagoshi et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-short.52.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-short.52.mp4
Code
 hppRC/defsent
Data
SICKSentEval