Contrasting distinct structured views to learn sentence embeddings

Antoine Simoulin, Benoit Crabbé


Abstract
We propose a self-supervised method that builds sentence embeddings from the combination of diverse explicit syntactic structures of a sentence. We assume structure is crucial to building consistent representations as we expect sentence meaning to be a function of both syntax and semantic aspects. In this perspective, we hypothesize that some linguistic representations might be better adapted given the considered task or sentence. We, therefore, propose to learn individual representation functions for different syntactic frameworks jointly. Again, by hypothesis, all such functions should encode similar semantic information differently and consequently, be complementary for building better sentential semantic embeddings. To assess such hypothesis, we propose an original contrastive multi-view framework that induces an explicit interaction between models during the training phase. We make experiments combining various structures such as dependency, constituency, or sequential schemes. Our results outperform comparable methods on several tasks from standard sentence embedding benchmarks.
Anthology ID:
2021.eacl-srw.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Ionut-Teodor Sorodoc, Madhumita Sushil, Ece Takmaz, Eneko Agirre
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
71–79
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-srw.11
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-srw.11
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Antoine Simoulin and Benoit Crabbé. 2021. Contrasting distinct structured views to learn sentence embeddings. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop, pages 71–79, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Contrasting distinct structured views to learn sentence embeddings (Simoulin & Crabbé, EACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-srw.11.pdf
Data
BookCorpusGLUESentEval