{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/encouraging-paragraph-embeddings-to-remember","title":"Encouraging Paragraph Embeddings to Remember Sentence Identity Improves Classification","arxiv_id":"1906.03656","date":"2019-06-09","proceeding":"ACL 2019 7","authors":["Tu Vu","Mohit Iyyer"],"abstract":"While paragraph embedding models are remarkably effective for downstream classification tasks, what they learn and encode into a single vector remains opaque. In this paper, we investigate a state-of-the-art paragraph embedding method proposed by Zhang et al. (2017) and discover that it cannot reliably tell whether a given sentence occurs in the input paragraph or not. We formulate a sentence content task to probe for this basic linguistic property and find that even a much simpler bag-of-words method has no trouble solving it. This result motivates us to replace the reconstruction-based objective of Zhang et al. (2017) with our sentence content probe objective in a semi-supervised setting. Despite its simplicity, our objective improves over paragraph reconstruction in terms of (1) downstream classification accuracies on benchmark datasets, (2) faster training, and (3) better generalization ability.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.03656v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.03656v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"encouraging-paragraph-embeddings-to-remember","repo_url":"https://github.com/tuvuumass/SCoPE","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"tf","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"classification-1","task_name":"Classification"},{"task_slug":"classification","task_name":"General Classification"},{"task_slug":"sentence","task_name":"Sentence"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}