Semantic Similarity as a Window into Vector- and Graph-Based Metrics

Wai Ching Leung, Shira Wein, Nathan Schneider


Abstract
In this work, we use sentence similarity as a lens through which to investigate the representation of meaning in graphs vs. vectors. On semantic textual similarity data, we examine how similarity metrics based on vectors alone (SENTENCE-BERT and BERTSCORE) fare compared to metrics based on AMR graphs (SMATCH and S2MATCH). Quantitative and qualitative analyses show that the AMR-based metrics can better capture meanings dependent on sentence structures, but can also be distracted by structural differences—whereas the BERT-based metrics represent finer-grained meanings of individual words, but often fail to capture the ordering effect of words within sentences and suffer from interpretability problems. These findings contribute to our understanding of each approach to semantic representation and motivate distinct use cases for graph and vector-based representations.
Anthology ID:
2022.gem-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics (GEM)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Editors:
Antoine Bosselut, Khyathi Chandu, Kaustubh Dhole, Varun Gangal, Sebastian Gehrmann, Yacine Jernite, Jekaterina Novikova, Laura Perez-Beltrachini
Venue:
GEM
SIG:
SIGGEN
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
106–115
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.gem-1.8
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.gem-1.8
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wai Ching Leung, Shira Wein, and Nathan Schneider. 2022. Semantic Similarity as a Window into Vector- and Graph-Based Metrics. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics (GEM), pages 106–115, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Semantic Similarity as a Window into Vector- and Graph-Based Metrics (Leung et al., GEM 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/2022.gem-1.8.pdf