Improving Multilingual Sentence Embedding using Bi-directional Dual Encoder with Additive Margin Softmax

Improving Multilingual Sentence Embedding using Bi-directional Dual Encoder with Additive Margin Softmax

Yinfei Yang, Gustavo Hernandez Abrego, Steve Yuan, Mandy Guo, Qinlan Shen, Daniel Cer, Yun-hsuan Sung, Brian Strope, Ray Kurzweil

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 5370-5378. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/746

In this paper, we present an approach to learn multilingual sentence embeddings using a bi-directional dual-encoder with additive margin softmax. The embeddings are able to achieve state-of-the-art results on the United Nations (UN) parallel corpus retrieval task. In all the languages tested, the system achieves P@1 of 86% or higher. We use pairs retrieved by our approach to train NMT models that achieve similar performance to models trained on gold pairs. We explore simple document-level embeddings constructed by averaging our sentence embeddings. On the UN document-level retrieval task, document embeddings achieve around 97% on P@1 for all experimented language pairs. Lastly, we evaluate the proposed model on the BUCC mining task. The learned embeddings with raw cosine similarity scores achieve competitive results compared to current state-of-the-art models, and with a second-stage scorer we achieve a new state-of-the-art level on this task.
Keywords:
Natural Language Processing: Information Retrieval
Natural Language Processing: Machine Translation
Natural Language Processing: Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Processing: Embeddings