Linguistically Conditioned Semantic Textual Similarity

Jingxuan Tu, Keer Xu, Liulu Yue, Bingyang Ye, Kyeongmin Rim, James Pustejovsky


Abstract
Semantic textual similarity (STS) is a fundamental NLP task that measures the semantic similarity between a pair of sentences. In order to reduce the inherent ambiguity posed from the sentences, a recent work called Conditional STS (C-STS) has been proposed to measure the sentences’ similarity conditioned on a certain aspect. Despite the popularity of C-STS, we find that the current C-STS dataset suffers from various issues that could impede proper evaluation on this task. In this paper, we reannotate the C-STS validation set and observe an annotator discrepancy on 55% of the instances resulting from the annotation errors in the original label, ill-defined conditions, and the lack of clarity in the task definition. After a thorough dataset analysis, we improve the C-STS task by leveraging the models’ capability to understand the conditions under a QA task setting. With the generated answers, we present an automatic error identification pipeline that is able to identify annotation errors from the C-STS data with over 80% F1 score. We also propose a new method that largely improves the performance over baselines on the C-STS data by training the models with the answers. Finally we discuss the conditionality annotation based on the typed-feature structure (TFS) of entity types. We show in examples that the TFS is able to provide a linguistic foundation for constructing C-STS data with new conditions.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.64
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1161–1172
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.64
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.64
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jingxuan Tu, Keer Xu, Liulu Yue, Bingyang Ye, Kyeongmin Rim, and James Pustejovsky. 2024. Linguistically Conditioned Semantic Textual Similarity. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1161–1172, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Linguistically Conditioned Semantic Textual Similarity (Tu et al., ACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.64.pdf