Challenge: Recent discrete latent variable models have received a surge of interest in both NLP and CV . they are comparable to the continuous counterparts in representation learning, but are more interpretable in their predictions.
Approach: They develop a topic-informed discrete latent variable model for semantic textual similarity . they inject the quantized representation into a transformer-based language model .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms strong baselines in semantic textual similarity tasks.

Similar Papers

Long Text Generation with Topic-aware Discrete Latent Variable Model (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent work focuses on the modeling of discourse relation, resulting in discrete codes learning shallow semantics.
Approach: They propose a topic-aware latent code-guided text generation model that encourages discrete codes to model information about topics.
Outcome: The proposed model generates more topic-relevant and coherent texts.
tBERT: Topic Models and BERT Joining Forces for Semantic Similarity Detection (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Recent pretrained contextual representations such as ELMo and BERT have led to impressive performance gains across a variety of NLP tasks, including semantic similarity detection.
Approach: They propose a topic-informed BERT-based architecture for pairwise semantic similarity detection that adds topic information to pretrained contextual representations such as BERT.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models on a variety of English language datasets and is highly performant.
CAST: Corpus-Aware Self-similarity Enhanced Topic modelling (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing topic modelling methods encode contextual information of documents while ignoring contextual details of candidate centroid words. Existing methods are limited by the contextualization gap.
Approach: They propose a topic modelling method that builds upon candidate centroid word embeddings contextualized on the dataset and a self-similarity-based method to filter out less meaningful tokens.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly enhances the coherence and diversity of generated topics, and handles noisy data, outperforming strong baselines.
A Neural Generative Model for Joint Learning Topics and Topic-Specific Word Embeddings (2020.tacl-1)

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Challenge: Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms word-level embedding methods in word similarity evaluation and word sense disambiguation.
Approach: They propose a generative model that explores local and global context for joint learning topics and topic-specific word embeddings.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms word-level embedding methods in word similarity evaluation and word sense disambiguation.
A Bilingual Generative Transformer for Semantic Sentence Embedding (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Semantic sentence embedding models encode natural language sentences into vectors, such that closeness in embeddable space indicates closeness of semantics between the sentences.
Approach: They propose a deep latent variable model that attempts to perform source separation on parallel sentences, isolating what they have in common in a latent semantic vector, and explaining what is left over with language-specific latent vectors.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art on a standard suite of unsupervised semantic similarity evaluations.
Pcc-tuning: Breaking the Contrastive Learning Ceiling in Semantic Textual Similarity (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) is a key indicator of the encoding capabilities of embedding models.
Approach: They propose to use Pearson’s correlation coefficient as a loss function to refine model performance beyond contrastive learning to achieve a Spearman’s ceiling.
Outcome: The proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art strategies with minimal amount of fine-grained annotated samples.
Mitigating Data Sparsity for Short Text Topic Modeling by Topic-Semantic Contrastive Learning (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing topic models do not make full use of word co-occurrence information to model latent topics.
Approach: They propose a novel short text topic modeling framework, Topic-Semantic Contrastive Topic Model, which uses augmented data and the data characteristic to learn the relations among samples.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines regardless of the data augmentation availability, producing high-quality topics and topic distributions.
Matching Varying-Length Texts via Topic-Informed and Decoupled Sentence Embeddings (2024.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to matching text with non-comparable lengths are limited due to truncation issues.
Approach: They propose a model that decouples sentences and embeds them into natural sentences for matching texts of significantly different lengths.
Outcome: The proposed model matches texts of significantly different lengths across three well-studied datasets.
Explicit Bayesian Inference to Uncover the Latent Themes of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have impressive generative capabilities, yet their inner mechanisms remain largely opaque.
Approach: They propose a variational autoencoder-based neural topic model to interpret LLMs generation process through an explicit Bayesian framework by inferring latent topic variables via variational inference.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art topic models on intrinsic measures of coherence and diversity on multiple datasets and shows significant gains on classification and summarization tasks.
Fine-grained Contrastive Learning for Definition Generation (2022.aacl-main)

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Challenge: Recent pre-trained transformer-based definition generation models lack effective representation learning to contain full semantic components of the given word, leading to under-specific definitions.
Approach: They propose a novel contrastive learning method that encourages the model to capture more detailed semantic representations from the definition sequence encoding.
Outcome: The proposed method could generate more specific definitions compared with state-of-the-art models.

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