Batch-Softmax Contrastive Loss for Pairwise Sentence Scoring Tasks

Anonymous

Paper Link: https://openreview.net/forum?id=z8c-HLryN5U

Paper Type: Long paper (up to eight pages of content + unlimited references and appendices)

Abstract:

The use of contrastive loss for representation learning has become prominent in computer vision, and it is now getting attention in Natural Language Processing (NLP).
Here, we explore the idea of using a batch-softmax contrastive loss when fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained transformer models to learn better task-specific sentence embeddings for pairwise sentence scoring tasks.
We introduce and study a number of variations in the calculation of the loss as well as in the overall training procedure; in particular, we find that a special data shuffling can be quite important.
Our experimental results show sizable improvements on a number of datasets and pairwise sentence scoring tasks including classification, ranking, and regression.
Finally, we offer detailed analysis and discussion, which should be useful for researchers aiming to explore the utility of contrastive loss in NLP.

Presentation Mode: This paper will be presented in person in Seattle

Copyright Consent Signature (type Name Or NA If Not Transferrable): Anton Chernyavskiy

Copyright Consent Name And Address: HSE University, Moscow, Russia