Papers › Sub-Sentence Encoder: Contrastive Learning of Propositional Semantic Representations

Sub-Sentence Encoder: Contrastive Learning of Propositional Semantic Representations

7 Nov 2023arXiv:2311.04335archive 2025-07-28

Sihao Chen, Hongming Zhang, Tong Chen, Ben Zhou, Wenhao Yu, Dian Yu, Baolin Peng, Hongwei Wang, Dan Roth, Dong Yu

We introduce sub-sentence encoder, a contrastively-learned contextual embedding model for fine-grained semantic representation of text. In contrast to the standard practice with sentence embeddings, where the meaning of an entire sequence of text is encoded into a fixed-length vector, the sub-sentence encoder learns to produce distinct contextual embeddings corresponding to different atomic propositions, i.e. atomic units of meaning expressed within a text sequence. The sub-sentence embeddings are contrastively learned to recognize (inferred) semantic equivalence between propositions across different text sequences. Our experiments show the effectiveness of sub-sentence encoders in applications, such as retrieving supporting facts for fine-grained text attribution or recognizing the conditional semantic similarity between texts. In practice, we demonstrate that sub-sentence encoders keep the same level of inference cost and space complexity compared to sentence encoders.

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Contrastive LearningSemantic SimilaritySemantic Textual SimilaritySentenceSentence Embeddings

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