Cited by 548Topic ModelingMultimodal Machine Learning ApplicationsNatural Language Processing Techniques

MTEB: Massive Text Embedding Benchmark

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Muennighoff, Niklas, Tazi, Nouamane, Magne, Loic, Reimers, Nils·2023·Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Abstract

Text embeddings are commonly evaluated on a small set of datasets from a single task not covering their possible applications to other tasks.It is unclear whether state-of-the-art embeddings on semantic textual similarity (STS) can be equally well applied to other tasks like clustering or reranking.This makes progress in the field difficult to track, as various models are constantly being proposed without proper evaluation.To solve this problem, we introduce the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB).MTEB spans 8 embedding tasks covering a total of 58 datasets and 112 languages.Through the benchmarking of 33 models on MTEB, we establish the most comprehensive benchmark of text embeddings to date.We find that no particular text embedding method dominates across all tasks.This suggests that the field has yet to converge on a universal text embedding method and scale it up sufficiently to provide state-of-the-art results on all embedding tasks.MTEB comes with open-source code and a public leaderboard at https://github.com/ embeddings-benchmark/mteb.

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  • The MoE approach has demonstrated excellent performance across a range of tasks within natural language processing and computer vision domains.

    “The MoE approach has demonstrated excellent performance across a range of tasks within natural language processing77 and computer vision domains.”

    From MoMA: a mixture-of-multimodal-agents architecture for enhancing clinical prediction modelling (2025) · cites this paper as [77]

    The Introduction describes MTEB as a benchmark for text-embedding models, and §4.2 analyzes those models’ performance across tasks. Searches for “MoE,” “mixture of experts,” and expert routing found no passage assessing the MoE approach in natural language processing; our copy therefore does not verify the claim attributed to this source. (LLM, conf=0.76)

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  • The Massive Text Embedding Benchmark shows that text-embedding-ada-002 is not clearly much better or worse than a variety of SentenceTransformers models, including all-MiniLM-L6-v2, across a range of tasks.

    “we consult the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark [63], which shows that the most powerful OpenAI embeddings model ( text-embedding-ada-002 ) is not clearly much better or worse than a variety of SentenceTransformers models (including all-MiniLM-L6-v2 ) across a range of tasks.”

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Research works printed but not linked: 7

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Authors
Muennighoff, N., Tazi, N., Magne, L., & Reimers, N.
Venue
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Published
2023
Pages
2014-2037
OpenAlex
W4386576685
Cited by
548
References
73
Citations by year
2026: 156 · 2025: 237 · 2024: 114 · 2023: 41
FWCI
97.02
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
  • Grand Équipement National De Calcul Intensif
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
Keywords
text embeddings, benchmark, semantic textual similarity, multilingual embeddings, embedding evaluation, clustering, re-ranking, cross-task generalization, open-source benchmark

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