Supervised Learning of Universal Sentence Representations from Natural Language Inference Data

Alexis Conneau, Douwe Kiela, Holger Schwenk, Loïc Barrault, Antoine Bordes


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 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.
Anthology ID:
D17-1070
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Martha Palmer, Rebecca Hwa, Sebastian Riedel
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
670–680
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1070
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D17-1070
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alexis Conneau, Douwe Kiela, Holger Schwenk, Loïc Barrault, and Antoine Bordes. 2017. Supervised Learning of Universal Sentence Representations from Natural Language Inference Data. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 670–680, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Supervised Learning of Universal Sentence Representations from Natural Language Inference Data (Conneau et al., EMNLP 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1070.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/D17-1070.mp4
Code
 facebookresearch/InferSent +  additional community code
Data
GLUEImageNetMRPCMS COCOMultiNLISICKSNLISentEvalXNLI