Towards Unsupervised Recognition of Token-level Semantic Differences in Related Documents

Jannis Vamvas, Rico Sennrich


Abstract
Automatically highlighting words that cause semantic differences between two documents could be useful for a wide range of applications. We formulate recognizing semantic differences (RSD) as a token-level regression task and study three unsupervised approaches that rely on a masked language model. To assess the approaches, we begin with basic English sentences and gradually move to more complex, cross-lingual document pairs. Our results show that an approach based on word alignment and sentence-level contrastive learning has a robust correlation to gold labels. However, all unsupervised approaches still leave a large margin of improvement.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.835
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13543–13552
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.835
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.835
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jannis Vamvas and Rico Sennrich. 2023. Towards Unsupervised Recognition of Token-level Semantic Differences in Related Documents. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 13543–13552, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Unsupervised Recognition of Token-level Semantic Differences in Related Documents (Vamvas & Sennrich, EMNLP 2023)
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https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.835.pdf
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