@inproceedings{wieting-etal-2020-bilingual,
    title = "A Bilingual Generative Transformer for Semantic Sentence Embedding",
    author = "Wieting, John  and
      Neubig, Graham  and
      Berg-Kirkpatrick, Taylor",
    editor = "Webber, Bonnie  and
      Cohn, Trevor  and
      He, Yulan  and
      Liu, Yang",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)",
    month = nov,
    year = "2020",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2020.emnlp-main.122/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.122",
    pages = "1581--1594",
    abstract = "Semantic sentence embedding models encode natural language sentences into vectors, such that closeness in embedding space indicates closeness in the semantics between the sentences. Bilingual data offers a useful signal for learning such embeddings: properties shared by both sentences in a translation pair are likely semantic, while divergent properties are likely stylistic or language-specific. We propose a deep latent variable model that attempts to perform source separation on parallel sentences, isolating what they have in common in a latent semantic vector, and explaining what is left over with language-specific latent vectors. Our proposed approach differs from past work on semantic sentence encoding in two ways. First, by using a variational probabilistic framework, we introduce priors that encourage source separation, and can use our model`s posterior to predict sentence embeddings for monolingual data at test time. Second, we use high-capacity transformers as both data generating distributions and inference networks {--} contrasting with most past work on sentence embeddings. In experiments, our approach substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art on a standard suite of unsupervised semantic similarity evaluations. Further, we demonstrate that our approach yields the largest gains on more difficult subsets of these evaluations where simple word overlap is not a good indicator of similarity."
}