In natural language processing, the performance of a semantic similarity task relies heavily on the availability of a large corpus. Various monolingual corpora are available (mainly English); but multilingual resources are very limited. In this work, we describe a semi-automated framework to create a multilingual corpus which can be used for the multilingual semantic similarity task. The similar sentence pairs are obtained by crawling bilingual websites, whereas the dissimilar sentence pairs are selected by applying topic modeling and an Open-AI GPT model on the similar sentence pairs. We focus on websites in the government, insurance, and banking domains to collect English-French and English-Spanish sentence pairs; however, this corpus creation approach can be applied to any other industry vertical provided that a bilingual website exists. We also show experimental results for multilingual semantic similarity to verify the quality of the corpus and demonstrate its usage.

In recent NLP research, a topic of interest is universal sentence encoding, sentence representations that can be used in any supervised task. At the word sequence level, fully attention-based models suffer from two problems: a quadratic increase in memory consumption with respect to the sentence length and an inability to capture and use syntactic information. Recursive neural nets can extract very good syntactic information by traversing a tree structure. To this end, we propose Tree Transformer, a model that captures phrase level syntax for constituency trees as well as word-level dependencies for dependency trees by doing recursive traversal only with attention. Evaluation of this model on four tasks gets noteworthy results compared to the standard transformer and LSTM-based models as well as tree-structured LSTMs. Ablation studies to find whether positional information is inherently encoded in the trees and which type of attention is suitable for doing the recursive traversal are provided.