Edit model card

Model card for PM-AI/sts_paraphrase_xlm-roberta-base_de-en

Model summary

Transformer model for Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) for German and Englisch sentences/texts. The embeddings output can be used for semantic search, paraphrasing and retrieval with cosine similarity. The Model is applicable to Englisch-German-Mixed sentences/texts but also for Englisch only and German only.

The model can be easily used with Sentence Transformer library.

Training

This model is based on a training approach from 2020 by Philip May, who published the T-Systems-onsite/cross-en-de-roberta-sentence-transformer model. We updated this approach by a new base model for fine-tuning and some extensions to the training data. These changes are discussed in the next sections.

Training Data

The model is based on training with samples from STSb, SICK and Priya22 semantic textual relatedness datasets. They contain about 76.000 sentence pairs in total. These sentence pairs are based on German-German, English-English and German-English mixed. The training object is to optimize for cosine similarity loss based on a human annoted sentence similarity score. In terms of content, the samples are based on rather simple sentences.

When the TSystems model was published, only the STSb dataset was used for STS training. Therefore it is included in our model, but expanded to include SICK and Priya22 semantic textual relatedness:

  • SICK was partly used in STSb, but our custom translation using DeepL leads to slightly different phrases. This approach allows more examples to be included in the training.
  • The Priya22 semantic textual relatedness dataset published in 2022 was also translated into German via DeepL and added to the training data. Since it does not have a train-test-split, it was created independently at a ratio of 80:20.

All training and test data (STSb, Sick, Priya22) were checked for duplicates within and with each other and removed if found. Because the test data is prioritized, duplicated entries between test-train are exclusively removed from train split. The final used datasets can be viewed here: datasets_sts_paraphrase_xlm-roberta-base_de-en

Training

Befor fine-tuning for STS we made the English paraphrasing model paraphrase-distilroberta-base-v1 usable for German by applying Knowledge Distillation (Teacher-Student approach). The TSystems model used version 1, which is based on 7 different datasets and contains around 24.6 million samples. We are using version 2 with 12 datasets and about 83.3 million examples. Details for this process here: PM-AI/paraphrase-distilroberta-base-v2_de-en

For fine-tuning we are using SBERT's training_stsbenchmark_continue_training.py training script. One thing has been changed in this training script: when a sentence pair consists of identical utterances the score is set to 5.0 (maximum). It makes no sense to say identical sentences have a score of 4.8 or 4.9.

Parameterization of training

Evaluation

Now the performance is measured cross-lingually as well as for German and English only. In addition, the test samples used are evaluated individually for each data set (STSb, SICK, Priya22), as well as in a large combined test data set (all). This subdivision per data set allows for a fair overall assessment, since external models are not built on the same data basis as the model presented here. The data is not evenly distributed in either training or testing!

❗Some models are only usable for one language (because they are monolingual). They will almost not perform at all in the other two tables. Still, they are good models in certain applications❗

The first table shows the evaluation results for cross-lingual (German-English-Mixed) based on Spearman:

model STSb SICK Priya22 all
PM-AI/sts_paraphrase_xlm-roberta-base_de-en (ours) 0.8672
🏆
0.8639
🏆
0.8354
🏆
0.8711
🏆
T-Systems-onsite/cross-en-de-roberta-sentence-transformer 0.8525 0.7642 0.7998 0.8216
PM-AI/paraphrase-distilroberta-base-v2_de-en (ours, no fine-tuning) 0.8225 0.7579 0.8255 0.8109
sentence-transformers/paraphrase-multilingual-mpnet-base-v2 0.8310 0.7529 0.8184 0.8102
sentence-transformers/stsb-xlm-r-multilingual 0.8194 0.7703 0.7566 0.7998
sentence-transformers/paraphrase-xlm-r-multilingual-v1 0.7985 0.7217 0.7975 0.7838
sentence-transformers/xlm-r-distilroberta-base-paraphrase-v1 0.7985 0.7217 0.7975 0.7838
sentence-transformers/paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2 0.7823 0.7090 0.7830 0.7834
sentence-transformers/distiluse-base-multilingual-cased-v1 0.7449 0.6941 0.7607 0.7534
sentence-transformers/distiluse-base-multilingual-cased-v2 0.7517 0.6950 0.7619 0.7496
sentence-transformers/distilbert-multilingual-nli-stsb-quora-ranking 0.7211 0.6650 0.7382 0.7200
Sahajtomar/German-semantic 0.7170 0.5871 0.7204 0.6802
symanto/sn-xlm-roberta-base-snli-mnli-anli-xnli 0.6488 0.5489 0.6688 0.6303
sentence-transformers/sentence-t5-large 0.6849 0.6063 0.7360 0.5843
sentence-transformers/sentence-t5-base 0.6013 0.5213 0.6671 0.5068
sentence-transformers/gtr-t5-large 0.5881 0.5168 0.6674 0.4984
deepset/gbert-large-sts 0.3842 0.3537 0.4105 0.4362
sentence-transformers/gtr-t5-base 0.5204 0.4346 0.6008 0.4276
textattack/bert-base-uncased-STS-B 0.0669 0.1135 0.0105 0.1514
symanto/xlm-roberta-base-snli-mnli-anli-xnli 0.1694 0.0440 0.0521 0.1156

The second table shows the evaluation results for German only based on Spearman:

model STSb SICK Priya22 all
PM-AI/sts_paraphrase_xlm-roberta-base_de-en (ours) 0.8658
🏆
0.8775
🏆
0.8432
🏆
0.8747
🏆
T-Systems-onsite/cross-en-de-roberta-sentence-transformer 0.8547 0.8047 0.8068 0.8327
Sahajtomar/German-semantic 0.8485 0.7915 0.8139 0.8280
sentence-transformers/paraphrase-multilingual-mpnet-base-v2 0.8360 0.7941 0.8237 0.8178
PM-AI/paraphrase-distilroberta-base-v2_de-en (ours, no fine-tuning) 0.8297 0.7930 0.8341 0.8170
sentence-transformers/stsb-xlm-r-multilingual 0.8190 0.8027 0.7674 0.8072
sentence-transformers/paraphrase-xlm-r-multilingual-v1 0.8079 0.7844 0.8126 0.8034
sentence-transformers/xlm-r-distilroberta-base-paraphrase-v1 0.8079 0.7844 0.8126 0.8034
sentence-transformers/paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2 0.7891 0.7830 0.8010 0.7981
sentence-transformers/distiluse-base-multilingual-cased-v1 0.7705 0.7612 0.7899 0.7780
sentence-transformers/sentence-t5-large 0.7771 0.7724 0.7829 0.7727
sentence-transformers/sentence-t5-base 0.7361 0.7613 0.7643 0.7602
sentence-transformers/distiluse-base-multilingual-cased-v2 0.7467 0.7494 0.7684 0.7584
sentence-transformers/distilbert-multilingual-nli-stsb-quora-ranking 0.7419 0.7420 0.7692 0.7566
sentence-transformers/gtr-t5-large 0.7252 0.7201 0.7613 0.7447
sentence-transformers/gtr-t5-base 0.7058 0.6943 0.7462 0.7271
symanto/sn-xlm-roberta-base-snli-mnli-anli-xnli 0.7284 0.7136 0.7109 0.6997
deepset/gbert-large-sts 0.6576 0.7141 0.6769 0.6959
textattack/bert-base-uncased-STS-B 0.4427 0.6023 0.4380 0.5380
symanto/xlm-roberta-base-snli-mnli-anli-xnli 0.4154 0.5048 0.3478 0.4540

And last but not least our third table which shows the evaluation results for English only based on Spearman:

model STSb SICK Priya22 all
PM-AI/sts_paraphrase_xlm-roberta-base_de-en (ours) 0.8768
🏆
0.8705
🏆
0.8402 0.8748
🏆
sentence-transformers/paraphrase-multilingual-mpnet-base-v2 0.8682 0.8065 0.8430 0.8378
PM-AI/paraphrase-distilroberta-base-v2_de-en (ours, no fine-tuning) 0.8597 0.8105 0.8399 0.8363
T-Systems-onsite/cross-en-de-roberta-sentence-transformer 0.8660 0.7897 0.8097 0.8308
sentence-transformers/paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2 0.8441 0.8059 0.8175 0.8300
sentence-transformers/sentence-t5-base 0.8551 0.8063 0.8434 0.8235
sentence-transformers/sentence-t5-large 0.8536 0.8097 0.8475
🏆
0.8191
sentence-transformers/stsb-xlm-r-multilingual 0.8503 0.8009 0.7675 0.8162
sentence-transformers/paraphrase-xlm-r-multilingual-v1 0.8350 0.7645 0.8211 0.8050
sentence-transformers/xlm-r-distilroberta-base-paraphrase-v1 0.8350 0.7645 0.8211 0.8050
sentence-transformers/distiluse-base-multilingual-cased-v2 0.8075 0.7534 0.7908 0.7828
sentence-transformers/distiluse-base-multilingual-cased-v1 0.8061 0.7421 0.7923 0.7784
Sahajtomar/German-semantic 0.8061 0.7098 0.7709 0.7712
sentence-transformers/distilbert-multilingual-nli-stsb-quora-ranking 0.7866 0.7477 0.7700 0.7691
sentence-transformers/gtr-t5-large 0.7763 0.7258 0.8124 0.7675
sentence-transformers/gtr-t5-base 0.7961 0.7129 0.8147 0.7669
symanto/sn-xlm-roberta-base-snli-mnli-anli-xnli 0.7799 0.7415 0.7335 0.7376
deepset/gbert-large-sts 0.5703 0.6011 0.5673 0.6060
textattack/bert-base-uncased-STS-B 0.4978 0.6099 0.5505 0.5754
symanto/xlm-roberta-base-snli-mnli-anli-xnli 0.3830 0.5180 0.3056 0.4414

❗It is crucial to understand that:

  • Only our model has seen training data from STSb, SICK and Priya22 combined, which is one reason for better results. The model has simply been trained to be more sensitive to these type of samples.
  • The datasets are not proportionally aligned in terms of their number of examples. For example, Priya22 is significantly underrepresented.
  • The compared models are of different sizes, which affects resource consumption (CPU, RAM) and inference speed (benchmark). So-called "large" models usually perform better, but also cost more (resources, monetary value) than e.g. "base" models.
  • Multilingual models are usually made multilingual by Knowledge Distillation, starting from a monolingual state. Therefore, they usually perform somewhat better in the original language.

Acknowledgment

This work is a collaboration between Technical University of Applied Sciences Wildau (TH Wildau) and sense.ai.tion GmbH. You can contact us via:

This work was funded by the European Regional Development Fund (EFRE) and the State of Brandenburg. Project/Vorhaben: "ProFIT: Natürlichsprachliche Dialogassistenten in der Pflege".

Logo of European Regional Development Fund (EFRE)
Logo of senseaition GmbH
Logo of TH Wildau
Downloads last month
15
Inference Examples
Inference API (serverless) does not yet support transformers models for this pipeline type.