Papers with semantic textual
Correlation Coefficients and Semantic Textual Similarity (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing research into semantic textual similarity has focused on word embeddings . little attention has been devoted to similarity measures between word embeds - a new study shows . |
| Approach: | They show that cosine similarity is essentially equivalent to the Pearson correlation coefficient for all common word vectors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the existing model on word-level and sentence-level similarity benchmarks. |
PTEB: Towards Robust Text Embedding Evaluation via Stochastic Paraphrasing at Evaluation Time with LLMs (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of sentence embedding models rely on static tests like the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) repeated tuning on a fixed suite can inflate reported performance and obscure real-world robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic protocol that generates meaning-preserving paraphrases at evaluation time and aggregates results across multiple runs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed protocol generates meaning-preserving paraphrases at evaluation time and aggregates results across multiple runs. |
SemRel2024: A Collection of Semantic Textual Relatedness Datasets for 13 Languages (2024.findings-acl)
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Nedjma Ousidhoum, Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Mohamed Abdalla, Idris Abdulmumin, Ibrahim Ahmad, Sanchit Ahuja, Alham Aji, Vladimir Araujo, Abinew Ayele, Pavan Baswani, Meriem Beloucif, Chris Biemann, Sofia Bourhim, Christine Kock, Genet Dekebo, Oumaima Hourrane, Gopichand Kanumolu, Lokesh Madasu, Samuel Rutunda, Manish Shrivastava, Thamar Solorio, Nirmal Surange, Hailegnaw Tilaye, Krishnapriya Vishnubhotla, Genta Winata, Seid Yimam, Saif Mohammad
| Challenge: | SemRel datasets are annotated by native speakers across 13 languages . they are used to characterise the relationship between two units of text . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a semantic relatedness dataset to measure the degree of semantic textual relatedness between sentences in Afrikaans, Algerian Arabic, Amharic, English, Hausa, Hindi, Indonesian, Kinyarwanda, Marathi, Moroccan Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Spanish, and Telugu. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets are annotated by native speakers across 13 languages and represent the semantic relatedness of 13 languages. |
Leveraging Bidding Graphs for Advertiser-Aware Relevance Modeling in Sponsored Search (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing relevance models rely on query-keyword pairs but keywords are usually short texts with scarce semantic information, which may not accurately reflect the underlying advertising purposes. |
| Approach: | They propose a bidding-graph augmented triple-based relevance model with three towers to deeply fuse the bidding graphs and semantic textual data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on a large industry dataset and consistently outperformed existing models. |
Aligning Cross-lingual Sentence Representations with Dual Momentum Contrast (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work uses sentences within the same batch as negatives, which suffers from easy negatives. |
| Approach: | They propose to align sentence representations from different languages into a unified embedding space . they adapt MoCo to further improve the quality of alignment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on several tasks. |
A Text is Worth Several Tokens: Text Embedding from LLMs Secretly Aligns Well with The Key Tokens (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | et al., 2023) show that text embeddings from large language models can be aligned with key tokens in input text. |
| Approach: | They propose a sparse retrieval method based on aligned tokens for large language models . they show that this phenomenon is universal and is not affected by model architecture . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve 80% of the dense retrieval effect of the same model while reducing the computation significantly. |
Transfer Fine-Tuning: A BERT Case Study (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in sentence representation learning have improved the performance of BERT models, but the computational power required is an obstacle preventing practical applications from adopting the technology. |
| Approach: | They propose to inject phrasal paraphrase relations into BERT to generate suitable representations for semantic equivalence assessment instead of increasing model size. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves a smaller model while maintaining the model size. |
Generating Datasets with Pretrained Language Models (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches to obtain high-quality sentence embeddings from pretrained language models require labeled data or finetuned on large set of labeles. |
| Approach: | They propose to use generative abilities of large and high-performing PLMs to generate entire datasets of labeled text pairs from scratch and fine tune much smaller and more efficient models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines on several semantic textual similarity datasets. |
Improving Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings from AI Feedback (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn sentence embeddings with rich semantics are limited due to the discrete nature of natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose to use AI feedback to improve contrastive learning of sentence embeddings by combining human feedback and AI feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several semantic textual similarity and transfer learning tasks compared to other unsupervised and supervised contrastive learning methods. |
Bridging Local Details and Global Context in Text-Attributed Graphs (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on combining different information levels but overlook interconnections, i.e., contextual textual information among nodes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that bridges local and global perspectives by leveraging contextual textual information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance while reducing tokens significantly. |
PAM: Paraphrase AMR-Centric Evaluation Metric (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current evaluation metrics for paraphrase generation are based on borrowed metrics from text-to-text tasks . this is not ideal for paraphrasing as we typically want variation in the lexicon while persisting semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a Paraphrase AMR-Centric Evaluation Metric that uses AMR graphs extracted from the input text to evaluate paraphrases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation metric improves on different semantic textual similarity datasets on paraphrases with human semantic scores. |
Ranking-Enhanced Unsupervised Sentence Representation Learning (2023.acl-long)
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Yeon Seonwoo, Guoyin Wang, Changmin Seo, Sajal Choudhary, Jiwei Li, Xiang Li, Puyang Xu, Sunghyun Park, Alice Oh
| Challenge: | Unsupervised sentence representation learning has progressed through contrastive learning and data augmentation methods such as dropout masking. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel unsupervised sentence encoder, RankEncoder, which predicts the semantic vector of an input sentence by leveraging its relationship with other sentences in an external corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed unsupervised sentence encoder achieves 80.07% Spearman’s correlation, a 1.1% improvement over the previous state-of-the-art system. |
BERT Has More to Offer: BERT Layers Combination Yields Better Sentence Embeddings (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Obtaining sentence representations from BERT-based models is valuable as it takes less time to pre-compute a one-time representation of the data and then use it for the downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine certain layers of a BERT-based model rested on the data set and model to achieve substantially better results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on seven semantic textual similarity datasets and on eight transfer data sets. |