ConSERT: A Contrastive Framework for Self-Supervised Sentence Representation Transfer

Yuanmeng Yan, Rumei Li, Sirui Wang, Fuzheng Zhang, Wei Wu, Weiran Xu


Abstract
Learning high-quality sentence representations benefits a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Though BERT-based pre-trained language models achieve high performance on many downstream tasks, the native derived sentence representations are proved to be collapsed and thus produce a poor performance on the semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks. In this paper, we present ConSERT, a Contrastive Framework for Self-Supervised SEntence Representation Transfer, that adopts contrastive learning to fine-tune BERT in an unsupervised and effective way. By making use of unlabeled texts, ConSERT solves the collapse issue of BERT-derived sentence representations and make them more applicable for downstream tasks. Experiments on STS datasets demonstrate that ConSERT achieves an 8% relative improvement over the previous state-of-the-art, even comparable to the supervised SBERT-NLI. And when further incorporating NLI supervision, we achieve new state-of-the-art performance on STS tasks. Moreover, ConSERT obtains comparable results with only 1000 samples available, showing its robustness in data scarcity scenarios.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.393
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5065–5075
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.393
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.393
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuanmeng Yan, Rumei Li, Sirui Wang, Fuzheng Zhang, Wei Wu, and Weiran Xu. 2021. ConSERT: A Contrastive Framework for Self-Supervised Sentence Representation Transfer. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5065–5075, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ConSERT: A Contrastive Framework for Self-Supervised Sentence Representation Transfer (Yan et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2021.acl-long.393.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2021.acl-long.393.mp4
Code
 yym6472/ConSERT
Data
MultiNLISICKSNLISentEval