MCSE: Multimodal Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings
Miaoran Zhang, Marius Mosbach, David Adelani, Michael Hedderich, Dietrich Klakow
Abstract
Learning semantically meaningful sentence embeddings is an open problem in natural language processing. In this work, we propose a sentence embedding learning approach that exploits both visual and textual information via a multimodal contrastive objective. Through experiments on a variety of semantic textual similarity tasks, we demonstrate that our approach consistently improves the performance across various datasets and pre-trained encoders. In particular, combining a small amount of multimodal data with a large text-only corpus, we improve the state-of-the-art average Spearman’s correlation by 1.7%. By analyzing the properties of the textual embedding space, we show that our model excels in aligning semantically similar sentences, providing an explanation for its improved performance.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.naacl-main.436
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Seattle, United States
- Editors:
- Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 5959–5969
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.436
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.436
- Cite (ACL):
- Miaoran Zhang, Marius Mosbach, David Adelani, Michael Hedderich, and Dietrich Klakow. 2022. MCSE: Multimodal Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 5959–5969, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- MCSE: Multimodal Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings (Zhang et al., NAACL 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2022.naacl-main.436.pdf
- Code
- uds-lsv/mcse
- Data
- Flickr30k, MS COCO, SICK