Sentence similarity evaluation using Sent2Vec and siamese neural network with parallel structure

Sentence similarity evaluation is a significant task used in machine translation, classification, and information extraction in the field of natural language processing. When two sentences are given, an accurate judgment should be made whether the meaning of the sentences is equivalent even if the words and contexts of the sentences are different. To this end, existing studies have measured the similarity of sentences by focusing on the analysis of words, morphemes, and letters. To measure sentence similarity, this study uses Sent2Vec, a sentence embedding, as well as morpheme word embedding. Vectors representing words are input to the 1-dimension convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) with various sizes of kernels and bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM). Self-attention is applied to the features transformed through Bi-LSTM. Subsequently, vectors undergoing 1D-CNN and self-attention are converted through global max pooling and global average pooling to extract specific values, respectively. The vectors generated through the above process are concatenated to the vector generated through Sent2Vec and are represented as a single vector. The vector is input to softmax layer, and finally, the similarity between the two sentences is determined. The proposed model can improve the accuracy by up to 5.42% point compared with the conventional sentence similarity estimation models.