Cited by 2,049Topic ModelingDomain Adaptation and Few-Shot LearningSentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining

Supervised Learning of Universal Sentence Representations from Natural Language Inference Data

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Conneau, Alexis, Kiela, Douwe, Schwenk, Holger, Barrault, Loïc, Bordes, Antoine·2017·Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Abstract

Many modern NLP systems rely on word embeddings, previously trained in an unsupervised manner on large corpora, as base features.Efforts to obtain embeddings for larger chunks of text, such as sentences, have however not been so successful.Several attempts at learning unsupervised representations of sentences have not reached satisfactory enough performance to be widely adopted.In this paper, we show how universal sentence representations trained using the supervised data of the Stanford Natural Language Inference datasets can consistently outperform unsupervised methods like SkipThought vectors (Kiros et al., 2015) on a wide range of transfer tasks.Much like how computer vision uses ImageNet to obtain features, which can then be transferred to other tasks, our work tends to indicate the suitability of natural language inference for transfer learning to other NLP tasks.Our encoder is publicly available 1 .

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  • Previous work found that the SNLI datasets are suitable for training sentence embeddings.

    “Previous work (Conneau et al., 2017; Cer et al., 2018) found that the SNLI datasets are suitable for training sentence embeddings.”

    From Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks (2019) · cites this paper as Conneau et al., 2017

  • InferSent uses labeled data of the Stanford Natural Language Inference dataset and the MultiGenre NLI dataset to train a siamese BiLSTM network with max-pooling over the output.

    “InferSent (Conneau et al., 2017) uses labeled data of the Stanford Natural Language Inference dataset (Bowman et al., 2015) and the MultiGenre NLI dataset (Williams et al., 2018) to train a siamese BiLSTM network with max-pooling over the output.”

    From Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks (2019) · cites this paper as Conneau et al., 2017

  • Fine-tuning SBERT on NLI data creates sentence embeddings that significantly outperform other state-of-the-art sentence embedding methods like InferSent and Universal Sentence Encoder.

    “We fine-tune SBERT on NLI data, which creates sentence embeddings that significantly outperform other state-of-the-art sentence embedding methods like InferSent (Conneau et al., 2017) and Universal Sentence Encoder (Cer et al., 2018).”

    From Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks (2019) · cites this paper as Conneau et al., 2017

  • Conneau et al. showed that InferSent consistently outperforms unsupervised methods like SkipThought.

    “Conneau et al. showed, that InferSent consistently outperforms unsupervised methods like SkipThought.”

    From Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks (2019) · cites this paper as Conneau et al., 2017

  • Conneau et al. (2017) found it beneficial for the BiLSTM-layer of InferSent to use MAX instead of MEAN pooling.

    “This is in contrast to (Conneau et al., 2017), who found it beneficial for the BiLSTM-layer of InferSent to use MAX instead of MEAN pooling.”

    From Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks (2019) · cites this paper as Conneau et al., 2017

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Research works printed but not linked: 14

  1. Stanislaw Antol, Aishwarya Agrawal, Jiasen Lu, Mar- garet Mitchell, Dhruv Batra, C Lawrence Zitnick, and Devi Parikh. 2015. Vqa: Visual question an- swering. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, pages 2425-2433.
  2. Sanjeev Arora, Yingyu Liang, and Tengyu Ma. 2017. A simple but tough-to-beat baseline for sentence em- beddings. Proceedings of the 5th International Con- ference on Learning Representations (ICLR).
  3. Jimmy Lei Ba, Jamie Ryan Kiros, and Geoffrey E Hin- ton. 2016. Layer normalization. Advances in neural information processing systems (NIPS).
  4. Samuel R. Bowman, Gabor Angeli, Christopher Potts, and Christopher D. Manning. 2015. A large an- notated corpus for learning natural language infer- ence. In Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP).
  5. Sepp Hochreiter and Jürgen Schmidhuber. 1997. Long short-term memory. Neural computation, 9(8):1735-1780.
  6. Yangfeng Ji and Jacob Eisenstein. 2013. Discrimina- tive improvements to distributional sentence simi- larity. In Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP).
  7. Andrej Karpathy and Li Fei-Fei. 2015. Deep visual- semantic alignments for generating image descrip- tions. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pages 3128-3137.
  8. Ryan Kiros, Yukun Zhu, Ruslan R Salakhutdinov, Richard Zemel, Raquel Urtasun, Antonio Torralba, and Sanja Fidler. 2015. Skip-thought vectors. In Advances in neural information processing systems (NIPS), pages 3294-3302.
  9. Quoc V Le and Tomas Mikolov. 2014. Distributed rep- resentations of sentences and documents. In Pro- ceedings of the 31st International Conference on Machine Learning, volume 14, pages 1188-1196.
  10. Tomas Mikolov, Ilya Sutskever, Kai Chen, Greg S Cor- rado, and Jeff Dean. 2013. Distributed representa- tions of words and phrases and their compositional- ity. In Advances in neural information processing systems (NIPS), pages 3111-3119.
  11. Ivan Vendrov, Ryan Kiros, Sanja Fidler, and Raquel Urtasun. 2016. Order-embeddings of images and language. International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).
  12. John Wieting, Mohit Bansal, Kevin Gimpel, and Karen Livescu. 2016a. Charagram: Embedding words and sentences via character n-grams. Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP).
  13. John Wieting, Mohit Bansal, Kevin Gimpel, and Karen Livescu. 2016b. Towards universal paraphrastic sentence embeddings. International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).
  14. Han Zhao, Zhengdong Lu, and Pascal Poupart. 2015. Self-adaptive hierarchical sentence model. In Pro- ceedings of the 24th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI'15, pages 4069-4076. AAAI Press.

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Authors
Conneau, A., Kiela, D., Schwenk, H., Barrault, L., & Bordes, A.
Affiliations
  • Meta (Israel) (IL)
  • University of Cambridge (GB)
  • Meta (United States) (US)
  • Le Mans Université (FR)
Venue
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Published
2017
Pages
670-680
OpenAlex
W2612953412
Cited by
2,049
References
32
Citations by year
2026: 31 · 2025: 76 · 2024: 113 · 2023: 213 · 2022: 221 · 2021: 335 · 2020: 392 · 2019: 427 · 2018: 224 · 2017: 16 · 2012: 1
FWCI
132.10
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • White Rose Research Online (University of Leeds, The University of Sheffield, University of York) (acceptedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • HAL (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining
Keywords
natural language inference, supervised learning, transfer learning, sentence embeddings, word embeddings

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