Augmented SBERT: Data Augmentation Method for Improving Bi-Encoders for Pairwise Sentence Scoring Tasks

Nandan Thakur, Nils Reimers, Johannes Daxenberger, Iryna Gurevych


Abstract
There are two approaches for pairwise sentence scoring: Cross-encoders, which perform full-attention over the input pair, and Bi-encoders, which map each input independently to a dense vector space. While cross-encoders often achieve higher performance, they are too slow for many practical use cases. Bi-encoders, on the other hand, require substantial training data and fine-tuning over the target task to achieve competitive performance. We present a simple yet efficient data augmentation strategy called Augmented SBERT, where we use the cross-encoder to label a larger set of input pairs to augment the training data for the bi-encoder. We show that, in this process, selecting the sentence pairs is non-trivial and crucial for the success of the method. We evaluate our approach on multiple tasks (in-domain) as well as on a domain adaptation task. Augmented SBERT achieves an improvement of up to 6 points for in-domain and of up to 37 points for domain adaptation tasks compared to the original bi-encoder performance.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.28
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
296–310
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.28
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.28
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nandan Thakur, Nils Reimers, Johannes Daxenberger, and Iryna Gurevych. 2021. Augmented SBERT: Data Augmentation Method for Improving Bi-Encoders for Pairwise Sentence Scoring Tasks. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 296–310, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Augmented SBERT: Data Augmentation Method for Improving Bi-Encoders for Pairwise Sentence Scoring Tasks (Thakur et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.28.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.28.mp4
Code
 UKPLab/sentence-transformers
Data
GLUEMRPCQuora Question PairsSNLI