SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings

Tianyu Gao, Xingcheng Yao, Danqi Chen

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

1461 Scopus citations

Abstract

This paper presents SimCSE, a simple contrastive learning framework that greatly advances the state-of-the-art sentence embeddings. We first describe an unsupervised approach, which takes an input sentence and predicts itself in a contrastive objective, with only standard dropout used as noise. This simple method works surprisingly well, performing on par with previous supervised counterparts. We find that dropout acts as minimal data augmentation and removing it leads to a representation collapse. Then, we propose a supervised approach, which incorporates annotated pairs from natural language inference datasets into our contrastive learning framework, by using “entailment” pairs as positives and “contradiction” pairs as hard negatives. We evaluate SimCSE on standard semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks, and our unsupervised and supervised models using BERTbase achieve an average of 76.3% and 81.6% Spearman's correlation respectively, a 4.2% and 2.2% improvement compared to previous best results. We also show-both theoretically and empirically-that contrastive learning objective regularizes pre-trained embeddings' anisotropic space to be more uniform, and it better aligns positive pairs when supervised signals are available.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationEMNLP 2021 - 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages6894-6910
Number of pages17
ISBN (Electronic)9781955917094
StatePublished - 2021
Externally publishedYes
Event2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2021 - Virtual, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Duration: Nov 7 2021Nov 11 2021

Publication series

NameEMNLP 2021 - 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings

Conference

Conference2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2021
Country/TerritoryDominican Republic
CityVirtual, Punta Cana
Period11/7/2111/11/21

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Information Systems

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