Self-Supervised Document Similarity Ranking via Contextualized Language Models and Hierarchical Inference

Dvir Ginzburg, Itzik Malkiel, Oren Barkan, Avi Caciularu, Noam Koenigstein

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

We present a novel model for the problem of ranking a collection of documents according to their semantic similarity to a source (query) document. While the problem of document-to-document similarity ranking has been studied, most modern methods are limited to relatively short documents or rely on the existence of “ground-truth” similarity labels. Yet, in most common real-world cases, similarity ranking is an unsupervised problem as similarity labels are unavailable. Moreover, an ideal model should not be restricted by documents' length. Hence, we introduce SDR, a self-supervised method for document similarity that can be applied to documents of arbitrary length. Importantly, SDR can be effectively applied to extremely long documents, exceeding the 4, 096 maximal token limit of Longformer. Extensive evaluations on large documents datasets show that SDR significantly outperforms its alternatives across all metrics. To accelerate future research on unlabeled long document similarity ranking, and as an additional contribution to the community, we herein publish two human-annotated test-sets of long documents similarity evaluation. The SDR code and datasets are publicly available.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Subtitle of host publicationACL-IJCNLP 2021
EditorsChengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages3088-3098
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781954085541
StatePublished - 2021
Externally publishedYes
EventFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: 1 Aug 20216 Aug 2021

Publication series

NameFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Conference

ConferenceFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021
CityVirtual, Online
Period1/08/216/08/21

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Association for Computational Linguistics

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