Direct Network Transfer: Transfer Learning of Sentence Embeddings for Semantic Similarity
Table 1: Count of valid submissions to and the numbering of each SemEval STS task from 2012 to 2017.
['[BOLD] Year', '[BOLD] Task no.', '[BOLD] Submissions']
Semantic similarity, or relating short texts in a semantic space – be those phrases, sentences or short paragraphs – is a task that requires systems to determine the degree of equivalence between the underlying semantics of the two texts. Although relatively easy for humans, this task remains one of the most difficult natural language understanding problems, receiving significant interest from the research community. For instance, from 2012 to 2017, the International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval) has been holding a shared task called Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) Agirre et al.