Static Word Embeddings for Sentence Semantic Representation

Takashi Wada, Yuki Hirakawa, Ryotaro Shimizu, Takahiro Kawashima, Yuki Saito


Abstract
We propose new static word embeddings optimised for sentence semantic representation. We first extract word embeddings from a pre-trained Sentence Transformer, and improve them with sentence-level principal component analysis, followed by either knowledge distillation or contrastive learning. During inference, we represent sentences by simply averaging word embeddings, which requires little computational cost. We evaluate models on both monolingual and cross-lingual tasks and show that our model substantially outperforms existing static models on sentence semantic tasks, and even surpasses a basic Sentence Transformer model (SimCSE) on a text embedding benchmark. Lastly, we perform a variety of analyses and show that our method successfully removes word embedding components that are not highly relevant to sentence semantics, and adjusts the vector norms based on the influence of words on sentence semantics.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.316
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6206–6222
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.316/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Takashi Wada, Yuki Hirakawa, Ryotaro Shimizu, Takahiro Kawashima, and Yuki Saito. 2025. Static Word Embeddings for Sentence Semantic Representation. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6206–6222, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Static Word Embeddings for Sentence Semantic Representation (Wada et al., EMNLP 2025)
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