Phrase-BERT: Improved Phrase Embeddings from BERT with an Application to Corpus Exploration

Shufan Wang, Laure Thompson, Mohit Iyyer


Abstract
Phrase representations derived from BERT often do not exhibit complex phrasal compositionality, as the model relies instead on lexical similarity to determine semantic relatedness. In this paper, we propose a contrastive fine-tuning objective that enables BERT to produce more powerful phrase embeddings. Our approach (Phrase-BERT) relies on a dataset of diverse phrasal paraphrases, which is automatically generated using a paraphrase generation model, as well as a large-scale dataset of phrases in context mined from the Books3 corpus. Phrase-BERT outperforms baselines across a variety of phrase-level similarity tasks, while also demonstrating increased lexical diversity between nearest neighbors in the vector space. Finally, as a case study, we show that Phrase-BERT embeddings can be easily integrated with a simple autoencoder to build a phrase-based neural topic model that interprets topics as mixtures of words and phrases by performing a nearest neighbor search in the embedding space. Crowdsourced evaluations demonstrate that this phrase-based topic model produces more coherent and meaningful topics than baseline word and phrase-level topic models, further validating the utility of Phrase-BERT.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.846
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10837–10851
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.846
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.846
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shufan Wang, Laure Thompson, and Mohit Iyyer. 2021. Phrase-BERT: Improved Phrase Embeddings from BERT with an Application to Corpus Exploration. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 10837–10851, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Phrase-BERT: Improved Phrase Embeddings from BERT with an Application to Corpus Exploration (Wang et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.846.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.846.mp4
Code
 sf-wa-326/phrase-bert-topic-model +  additional community code
Data
BiRDPAWSThe Pile