Papers › tBERT: Topic Models and BERT Joining Forces for Semantic Similarity Detection

tBERT: Topic Models and BERT Joining Forces for Semantic Similarity Detection

1 Jul 2020ACL 2020 6archive 2025-07-28

Nicole Peinelt, Dong Nguyen, Maria Liakata

Semantic similarity detection is a fundamental task in natural language understanding. Adding topic information has been useful for previous feature-engineered semantic similarity models as well as neural models for other tasks. There is currently no standard way of combining topics with pretrained contextual representations such as BERT. We propose a novel topic-informed BERT-based architecture for pairwise semantic similarity detection and show that our model improves performance over strong neural baselines across a variety of English language datasets. We find that the addition of topics to BERT helps particularly with resolving domain-specific cases.

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Tasks

Natural Language Understanding Semantic Similarity Semantic Textual Similarity Topic Models

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Adam Attention Attention Dropout BERT Dense Connections Dropout Layer Normalization Linear Layer Linear Warmup With Linear Decay Multi-Head Attention Residual Connection Softmax Weight Decay WordPiece

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