SBERT studies Meaning Representations: Decomposing Sentence Embeddings into Explainable Semantic Features

Juri Opitz, Anette Frank


Abstract
Models based on large-pretrained language models, such as S(entence)BERT, provide effective and efficient sentence embeddings that show high correlation to human similarity ratings, but lack interpretability. On the other hand, graph metrics for graph-based meaning representations (e.g., Abstract Meaning Representation, AMR) can make explicit the semantic aspects in which two sentences are similar. However, such metrics tend to be slow, rely on parsers, and do not reach state-of-the-art performance when rating sentence similarity. In this work, we aim at the best of both worlds, by learning to induce Semantically Structured Sentence BERT embeddings (S3BERT). Our S3BERT embeddings are composed of explainable sub-embeddings that emphasize various sentence meaning features (e.g., semantic roles, negation, or quantification). We show how to i) learn a decomposition of the sentence embeddings into meaning features, through approximation of a suite of interpretable semantic AMR graph metrics, and how to ii) preserve the overall power of the neural embeddings by controlling the decomposition learning process with a second objective that enforces consistency with the similarity ratings of an SBERT teacher model. In our experimental studies, we show that our approach offers interpretability – while preserving the effectiveness and efficiency of the neural sentence embeddings.
Anthology ID:
2022.aacl-main.48
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
November
Year:
2022
Address:
Online only
Editors:
Yulan He, Heng Ji, Sujian Li, Yang Liu, Chua-Hui Chang
Venues:
AACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
625–638
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.48
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Juri Opitz and Anette Frank. 2022. SBERT studies Meaning Representations: Decomposing Sentence Embeddings into Explainable Semantic Features. In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 625–638, Online only. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SBERT studies Meaning Representations: Decomposing Sentence Embeddings into Explainable Semantic Features (Opitz & Frank, AACL-IJCNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.48.pdf