<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="kong-etal-2026-sure">
    <titleInfo>
        <title>SURE or Not? Investigating Semantic Understanding in Dense Retrieval Models</title>
    </titleInfo>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Lingdi</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Kong</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Xuanang</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Chen</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Ben</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">He</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Le</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Sun</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <originInfo>
        <dateIssued>2026-07</dateIssued>
    </originInfo>
    <typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
    <relatedItem type="host">
        <titleInfo>
            <title>Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)</title>
        </titleInfo>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Maria</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Liakata</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Viviane</namePart>
            <namePart type="given">P</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Moreira</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Jiajun</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Zhang</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">David</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Jurgens</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <originInfo>
            <publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
            <place>
                <placeTerm type="text">San Diego, California, United States</placeTerm>
            </place>
        </originInfo>
        <genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
        <identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-390-6</identifier>
    </relatedItem>
    <abstract>Dense retrieval has become a core technique in applications like web search and retrieval-augmented generation. Despite their empirical success, it remains unclear whether these models truly understand semantics. To address this gap, this paper conducts a systematic investigation by introducing SURE, a benchmark for Semantic Understanding in dense REtrieval built upon the MSMARCO, NQ, and FiQA datasets. SURE characterizes semantic understanding in dense retrieval along three dimensions: semantic precision, semantic abstraction, and semantic equivalence. We evaluate ten representative models ranging from 110M to 8B parameters, including both general-purpose and domain-specific models. Results show that current dense retrievers struggle to distinguish fine-grained semantic differences across texts with varying information density, and to recognize semantic consistency under lexical paraphrasing. Moreover, larger models do not necessarily exhibit stronger semantic understanding, and diverse training data generally enhances semantic understanding on challenging retrieval tasks.</abstract>
    <identifier type="citekey">kong-etal-2026-sure</identifier>
    <location>
        <url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.2127/</url>
    </location>
    <part>
        <date>2026-07</date>
        <extent unit="page">
            <start>45873</start>
            <end>45887</end>
        </extent>
    </part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>

%0 Conference Proceedings
%T SURE or Not? Investigating Semantic Understanding in Dense Retrieval Models
%A Kong, Lingdi
%A Chen, Xuanang
%A He, Ben
%A Sun, Le
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-390-6
%F kong-etal-2026-sure
%X Dense retrieval has become a core technique in applications like web search and retrieval-augmented generation. Despite their empirical success, it remains unclear whether these models truly understand semantics. To address this gap, this paper conducts a systematic investigation by introducing SURE, a benchmark for Semantic Understanding in dense REtrieval built upon the MSMARCO, NQ, and FiQA datasets. SURE characterizes semantic understanding in dense retrieval along three dimensions: semantic precision, semantic abstraction, and semantic equivalence. We evaluate ten representative models ranging from 110M to 8B parameters, including both general-purpose and domain-specific models. Results show that current dense retrievers struggle to distinguish fine-grained semantic differences across texts with varying information density, and to recognize semantic consistency under lexical paraphrasing. Moreover, larger models do not necessarily exhibit stronger semantic understanding, and diverse training data generally enhances semantic understanding on challenging retrieval tasks.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.2127/
%P 45873-45887

Markdown (Informal)

[SURE or Not? Investigating Semantic Understanding in Dense Retrieval Models](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.2127/) (Kong et al., ACL 2026)

• SURE or Not? Investigating Semantic Understanding in Dense Retrieval Models (Kong et al., ACL 2026)

ACL

• Lingdi Kong, Xuanang Chen, Ben He, and Le Sun. 2026. SURE or Not? Investigating Semantic Understanding in Dense Retrieval Models. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 45873–45887, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.