We propose a new model for unsupervised document embedding. Leading existing approaches either require complex inference or use recurrent neural networks (RNN) that are difficult to parallelize. We take a different route and develop a convolutional neural network (CNN) embedding model. Our CNN architecture is fully parallelizable resulting in over 10x speedup in inference time over RNN models. Parallelizable architecture enables to train deeper models where each successive layer has increasingly larger receptive field and models longer range semantic structure within the document. We additionally propose a fully unsupervised learning algorithm to train this model based on stochastic forward prediction. Empirical results on two public benchmarks show that our approach produces comparable to state-of-the-art accuracy at a fraction of computational cost.
We present a contrasting learning approach with data augmentation techniques to learn document representations in an unsupervised manner. Inspired by recent contrastive self-supervised learning algorithms used for image and NLP pretraining, we hypothesize that high-quality document embedding should be invariant to diverse paraphrases that preserve the semantics of the original document. With different backbones and contrastive learning frameworks, our study reveals the enormous benefits of contrastive augmentation for document representation learning with two additional insights: 1) including data augmentation in a contrastive way can substantially improve the embedding quality in unsupervised document representation learning, and 2) in general, stochastic augmentations generated by simple word-level manipulation work much better than sentence-level and document-level ones. We plug our method into a classifier and compare it with a broad range of baseline methods on six benchmark datasets. Our method can decrease the classification error rate by up to 6.4% over the SOTA approaches on the document classification task, matching or even surpassing fully-supervised methods.
We propose in this paper a new, hybrid document embedding approach in order to address the problem of document similarities with respect to the technical content. To do so, we employ a state-of-the-art graph techniques to first extract the keyphrases (composite keywords) of documents and, then, use them to score the sentences. Using the ranked sentences, we propose two approaches to embed documents and show their performances with respect to two baselines. With domain expert annotations, we illustrate that the proposed methods can find more relevant documents and outperform the baselines up to 27% in terms of NDCG.
Recently, doc2vec has achieved excellent results in different tasks. In this paper, we present a context aware variant of doc2vec. We introduce a novel weight estimating mechanism that generates weights for each word occurrence according to its contribution in the context, using deep neural networks. Our context aware model can achieve similar results compared to doc2vec initialized byWikipedia trained vectors, while being much more efficient and free from heavy external corpus. Analysis of context aware weights shows they are a kind of enhanced IDF weights that capture sub-topic level keywords in documents. They might result from deep neural networks that learn hidden representations with the least entropy.
While the celebrated Word2Vec technique yields semantically rich representations for individual words, there has been relatively less success in extending to generate unsupervised sentences or documents embeddings. Recent work has demonstrated that a distance measure between documents called emph{Word Movers Distance} (WMD) that aligns semantically similar words, yields unprecedented KNN classification accuracy. However, WMD is expensive to compute, and it is hard to extend its use beyond a KNN classifier. In this paper, we propose the emph{Word Movers Embedding } (WME), a novel approach to building an unsupervised document (sentence) embedding from pre-trained word embeddings. In our experiments on 9 benchmark text classification datasets and 22 textual similarity tasks, the proposed technique consistently matches or outperforms state-of-the-art techniques, with significantly higher accuracy on problems of short length.
BERT is inefficient for sentence-pair tasks such as clustering or semantic search as it needs to evaluate combinatorially many sentence pairs which is very time-consuming. Sentence BERT (SBERT) attempted to solve this challenge by learning semantically meaningful representations of single sentences, such that similarity comparison can be easily accessed. However, SBERT is trained on corpus with high-quality labeled sentence pairs, which limits its application to tasks where labeled data is extremely scarce. In this paper, we propose a lightweight extension on top of BERT and a novel self-supervised learning objective based on mutual information maximization strategies to derive meaningful sentence embeddings in an unsupervised manner. Unlike SBERT, our method is not restricted by the availability of labeled data, such that it can be applied on different domain-specific corpus. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms other unsupervised sentence embedding baselines on common semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks and downstream supervised tasks. It also outperforms SBERT in a setting where in-domain labeled data is not available, and achieves performance competitive with supervised methods on various tasks.