Sentence Transformers: Multilingual Sentence, Paragraph, and Image Embeddings using BERT & Co.

This framework provides an easy method to compute dense vector representations for sentences, paragraphs, and images. The models are based on transformer networks like BERT / RoBERTa / XLM-RoBERTa etc. and achieve state-of-the-art performance in various tasks. Text is embedded in vector space such that similar text are closer and can efficiently be found using cosine similarity.

We provide an increasing number of state-of-the-art pretrained models for more than 100 languages, fine-tuned for various use-cases.

Further, this framework allows an easy fine-tuning of custom embeddings models, to achieve maximal performance on your specific task.

For the full documentation, see www.SBERT.net.

The following publications are integrated in this framework:

Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks (EMNLP 2019)
Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation (EMNLP 2020)
Augmented SBERT: Data Augmentation Method for Improving Bi-Encoders for Pairwise Sentence Scoring Tasks (NAACL 2021)
The Curse of Dense Low-Dimensional Information Retrieval for Large Index Sizes (arXiv 2020)
TSDAE: Using Transformer-based Sequential Denoising Auto-Encoder for Unsupervised Sentence Embedding Learning (arXiv 2021)
BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models (arXiv 2021)
Matryoshka Representation Learning (arXiv 2022)

Installation

We recommend Python 3.8 or higher, PyTorch 1.11.0 or higher and transformers v4.32.0 or higher. The code does not work with Python 2.7.

Install with pip

Install the sentence-transformers with pip:

pip install -U sentence-transformers

Install with conda

You can install the sentence-transformers with conda:

conda install -c conda-forge sentence-transformers

Install from sources

Alternatively, you can also clone the latest version from the repository and install it directly from the source code:

pip install -e .

PyTorch with CUDA

If you want to use a GPU / CUDA, you must install PyTorch with the matching CUDA Version. Follow PyTorch - Get Started for further details how to install PyTorch.

Getting Started

See Quickstart in our documenation.

This example shows you how to use an already trained Sentence Transformer model to embed sentences for another task.

First download a pretrained model.

from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer

model = SentenceTransformer("all-MiniLM-L6-v2")

Then provide some sentences to the model.

sentences = [
    "This framework generates embeddings for each input sentence",
    "Sentences are passed as a list of string.",
    "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.",
]
sentence_embeddings = model.encode(sentences)

And that's it already. We now have a list of numpy arrays with the embeddings.

for sentence, embedding in zip(sentences, sentence_embeddings):
    print("Sentence:", sentence)
    print("Embedding:", embedding)
    print("")

Pre-Trained Models

We provide a large list of Pretrained Models for more than 100 languages. Some models are general purpose models, while others produce embeddings for specific use cases. Pre-trained models can be loaded by just passing the model name: SentenceTransformer('model_name').

» Full list of pretrained models

Training

This framework allows you to fine-tune your own sentence embedding methods, so that you get task-specific sentence embeddings. You have various options to choose from in order to get perfect sentence embeddings for your specific task.

See Training Overview for an introduction how to train your own embedding models. We provide various examples how to train models on various datasets.

Some highlights are:

Support of various transformer networks including BERT, RoBERTa, XLM-R, DistilBERT, Electra, BART, ...
Multi-Lingual and multi-task learning
Evaluation during training to find optimal model
20+ loss-functions allowing to tune models specifically for semantic search, paraphrase mining, semantic similarity comparison, clustering, triplet loss, contrastive loss.

Performance

Our models are evaluated extensively on 15+ datasets including challening domains like Tweets, Reddit, emails. They achieve by far the best performance from all available sentence embedding methods. Further, we provide several smaller models that are optimized for speed.

» Full list of pretrained models

Application Examples

You can use this framework for:

and many more use-cases.

For all examples, see examples/applications.

Development setup

After cloning the repo (or a fork) to your machine, in a virtual environment, run:

python -m pip install -e ".[dev]"

pre-commit install

To test your changes, run:

pytest

Citing & Authors

If you find this repository helpful, feel free to cite our publication Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks:

@inproceedings{reimers-2019-sentence-bert,
    title = "Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks",
    author = "Reimers, Nils and Gurevych, Iryna",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = "11",
    year = "2019",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10084",
}

If you use one of the multilingual models, feel free to cite our publication Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation:

@inproceedings{reimers-2020-multilingual-sentence-bert,
    title = "Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation",
    author = "Reimers, Nils and Gurevych, Iryna",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = "11",
    year = "2020",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.09813",
}

Please have a look at Publications for our different publications that are integrated into SentenceTransformers.

Contact person: Tom Aarsen, [email protected]

https://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/

Don't hesitate to open an issue if something is broken (and it shouldn't be) or if you have further questions.

This repository contains experimental software and is published for the sole purpose of giving additional background details on the respective publication.

UKPLab/sentence-transformers

UKPLab

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