Zhang, Miaoran; Mosbach, Marius; Adelani, David; Hedderich, Michael; Klakow, Dietrich
MCSE: Multimodal Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 5959-5969, Seattle, United States, 2022.
Learning semantically meaningful sentence embeddings is an open problem in natural language processing. In this work, we propose a sentence embedding learning approach that exploits both visual and textual information via a multimodal contrastive objective. Through experiments on a variety of semantic textual similarity tasks, we demonstrate that our approach consistently improves the performance across various datasets and pre-trained encoders. In particular, combining a small amount of multimodal data with a large text-only corpus, we improve the state-of-the-art average Spearman{‚}s correlation by 1.7{\%}. By analyzing the properties of the textual embedding space, we show that our model excels in aligning semantically similar sentences, providing an explanation for its improved performance.