Evaluation Benchmarks and Learning Criteria for Discourse-Aware Sentence Representations

Mingda Chen, Zewei Chu, Kevin Gimpel


Abstract
Prior work on pretrained sentence embeddings and benchmarks focus on the capabilities of stand-alone sentences. We propose DiscoEval, a test suite of tasks to evaluate whether sentence representations include broader context information. We also propose a variety of training objectives that makes use of natural annotations from Wikipedia to build sentence encoders capable of modeling discourse. We benchmark sentence encoders pretrained with our proposed training objectives, as well as other popular pretrained sentence encoders on DiscoEval and other sentence evaluation tasks. Empirically, we show that these training objectives help to encode different aspects of information in document structures. Moreover, BERT and ELMo demonstrate strong performances over DiscoEval with individual hidden layers showing different characteristics.
Anthology ID:
D19-1060
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
649–662
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1060
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1060
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mingda Chen, Zewei Chu, and Kevin Gimpel. 2019. Evaluation Benchmarks and Learning Criteria for Discourse-Aware Sentence Representations. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 649–662, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluation Benchmarks and Learning Criteria for Discourse-Aware Sentence Representations (Chen et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1060.pdf
Attachment:
 D19-1060.Attachment.zip
Code
 ZeweiChu/DiscoEval +  additional community code
Data
SentEval