prompt_front: You are given a scientific article and a question. Answer the question as concisely as you can, using a single phrase or sentence if possible. If the question cannot be answered based on the information in the article, write "unanswerable". If the question is a yes/no question, answer "yes", "no", or "unanswerable". Do not provide any explanation.

Please answer the questions based on the text provided below. How does Gaussian-masked directional multi-head attention works?
Context 1: Introduction
Chinese word segmentation (CWS) is a task for Chinese natural language process to delimit word boundary  CWS is a basic and essential task for Chinese which is written without explicit word delimiters and different from alphabetical languages like English  BIBREF0 treats Chinese word segmentation (CWS) as a sequence labeling task with character position tags, which is followed by BIBREF1, BIBREF2, BIBREF3  Traditional CWS models depend on the design of features heavily which effects the performance of model  To minimize the effort in feature engineering, some CWS models BIBREF4, BIBREF5, BIBREF6, BIBREF7, BIBREF8, BIBREF9, BIBREF10, BIBREF11 are developed following neural network architecture for sequence labeling tasks BIBREF12  Neural CWS models perform strong ability of feature representation, employing unigram and bigram character embedding as input and approach good performance 
The CWS task is often modeled as one graph model based on a scoring model that means it is composed of two parts, one part is an encoder which is used to generate the representation of characters from the input sequence, the other part is a decoder which performs segmentation according to the encoder scoring  Table TABREF1 summarizes typical CWS models according to their decoding ways for both traditional and neural models  Markov models such as BIBREF13 and BIBREF4 depend on the maximum entropy model or maximum entropy Markov model both with a Viterbi decoder  Besides, conditional random field (CRF) or Semi-CRF for sequence labeling has been used for both traditional and neural models though with different representations BIBREF2, BIBREF15, BIBREF10, BIBREF17, BIBREF18  Generally speaking, the major difference between traditional and neural network models is about the way to represent input sentences 
Recent works about neural CWS which focus on benchmark dataset, namely SIGHAN Bakeoff BIBREF21, may be put into the following three categories roughly 
Encoder  Practice in various natural language processing tasks has been shown that effective representation is essential to the performance improvement  Thus for better CWS, it is crucial to encode the input character, word or sentence into effective representation  Table TABREF2 summarizes regular feature sets for typical CWS models including ours as well  The building blocks that encoders use include recurrent neural network (RNN) and convolutional neural network (CNN), and long-term memory network (LSTM) 
Graph model  As CWS is a kind of structure learning task, the graph model determines which type of decoder should be adopted for segmentation, also it may limit the capability of defining feature, as shown in Table 2, not all graph models can support the word features  Thus recent work focused on finding more general or flexible graph model to make model learn the representation of segmentation more effective as BIBREF9, BIBREF11 
External data and pre-trained embedding  Whereas both encoder and graph model are about exploring a way to get better performance only by improving the model strength itself  Using external resource such as pre-trained embeddings or language representation is an alternative for the same purpose BIBREF22, BIBREF23  SIGHAN Bakeoff defines two types of evaluation settings, closed test limits all the data for learning should not be beyond the given training set, while open test does not take this limitation BIBREF21  In this work, we will focus on the closed test setting by finding a better model design for further CWS performance improvement 
Shown in Table TABREF1, different decoders have particular decoding algorithms to match the respective CWS models  Markov models and CRF-based models often use Viterbi decoders with polynomial time complexity  In general graph model, search space may be too large for model to search  Thus it forces graph models to use an approximate beam search strategy  Beam search algorithm has a kind low-order polynomial time complexity  Especially, when beam width $b$=1, the beam search algorithm will reduce to greedy algorithm with a better time complexity $O(Mn)$ against the general beam search time complexity $O(Mnb^2)$, where $n$ is the number of units in one sentences, $M$ is a constant representing the model complexity  Greedy decoding algorithm can bring the fastest speed of decoding while it is not easy to guarantee the precision of decoding when the encoder is not strong enough 
In this paper, we focus on more effective encoder design which is capable of offering fast and accurate Chinese word segmentation with only unigram feature and greedy decoding  Our proposed encoder will only consist of attention mechanisms as building blocks but nothing else  Motivated by the Transformer BIBREF24 and its strength of capturing long-range dependencies of input sentences, we use a self-attention network to generate the representation of input which makes the model encode sentences at once without feeding input iteratively  Considering the weakness of the Transformer to model relative and absolute position information directly BIBREF25 and the importance of localness information, position information and directional information for CWS, we further improve the architecture of standard multi-head self-attention of the Transformer with a directional Gaussian mask and get a variant called Gaussian-masked directional multi-head attention  Based on the newly improved attention mechanism, we expand the encoder of the Transformer to capture different directional information  With our powerful encoder, our model uses only simple unigram features to generate representation of sentences 
For decoder which directly performs the segmentation, we use the bi-affinal attention scorer, which has been used in dependency parsing BIBREF26 and semantic role labeling BIBREF27, to implement greedy decoding on finding the boundaries of words  In our proposed model, greedy decoding ensures a fast segmentation while powerful encoder design ensures a good enough segmentation performance even working with greedy decoder together  Our model will be strictly evaluated on benchmark datasets from SIGHAN Bakeoff shared task on CWS in terms of closed test setting, and the experimental results show that our proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art 
The technical contributions of this paper can be summarized as follows 
We propose a CWS model with only attention structure  The encoder and decoder are both based on attention structure 
With a powerful enough encoder, we for the first time show that unigram (character) featues can help yield strong performance instead of diverse $n$-gram (character and word) features in most of previous work 
To capture the representation of localness information and directional information, we propose a variant of directional multi-head self-attention to further enhance the state-of-the-art Transformer encoder 
Models
The CWS task is often modelled as one graph model based on an encoder-based scoring model  The model for CWS task is composed of an encoder to represent the input and a decoder based on the encoder to perform actual segmentation  Figure FIGREF6 is the architecture of our model  The model feeds sentence into encoder  Embedding captures the vector $e=(e_1,   ,e_n)$ of the input character sequences of $c=(c_1,   ,c_n)$  The encoder maps vector sequences of $ {e}=(e_1,  ,e_n)$ to two sequences of vector which are $ {v^b}=(v_1^b,   ,v_n^b)$ and ${v^f}=(v_1^f,   v_n^f)$ as the representation of sentences  With $v^b$ and $v^f$, the bi-affinal scorer calculates the probability of each segmentation gaps and predicts the word boundaries of input  Similar as the Transformer, the encoder is an attention network with stacked self-attention and point-wise, fully connected layers while our encoder includes three independent directional encoders 
Models ::: Encoder Stacks
In the Transformer, the encoder is composed of a stack of N identical layers and each layer has one multi-head self-attention layer and one position-wise fully connected feed-forward layer  One residual connection is around two sub-layers and followed by layer normalization BIBREF24  This architecture provides the Transformer a good ability to generate representation of sentence 
With the variant of multi-head self-attention, we design a Gaussian-masked directional encoder to capture representation of different directions to improve the ability of capturing the localness information and position information for the importance of adjacent characters  One unidirectional encoder can capture information of one particular direction 
For CWS tasks, one gap of characters, which is from a word boundary, can divide one sequence into two parts, one part in front of the gap and one part in the rear of it  The forward encoder and backward encoder are used to capture information of two directions which correspond to two parts divided by the gap 
One central encoder is paralleled with forward and backward encoders to capture the information of entire sentences  The central encoder is a special directional encoder for forward and backward information of sentences  The central encoder can fuse the information and enable the encoder to capture the global information 
The encoder outputs one forward information and one backward information of each positions  The representation of sentence generated by center encoder will be added to these information directly:
where $v^{b}=(v^b_1,   ,v^b_n)$ is the backward information, $v^{f}=(v^f_1,   ,v^f_n)$ is the forward information, $r^{b}=(r^b_1,   ,r^b_n)$ is the output of backward encoder, $r^{c}=(r^c_1,   ,r^c_n)$ is the output of center encoder and $r^{f}=(r^f_1,   ,r^f_n)$ is the output of forward encoder 
Models ::: Gaussian-Masked Directional Multi-Head Attention
Similar as scaled dot-product attention BIBREF24, Gaussian-masked directional attention can be described as a function to map queries and key-value pairs to the representation of input  Here queries, keys and values are all vectors  Standard scaled dot-product attention is calculated by dotting query $Q$ with all keys $K$, dividing each values by $\sqrt{d_k}$, where $\sqrt{d_k}$ is the dimension of keys, and apply a softmax function to generate the weights in the attention:
Different from scaled dot-product attention, Gaussian-masked directional attention expects to pay attention to the adjacent characters of each positions and cast the localness relationship between characters as a fix Gaussian weight for attention  We assume that the Gaussian weight only relys on the distance between characters 
Firstly we introduce the Gaussian weight matrix $G$ which presents the localness relationship between each two characters:
where $g_{ij}$ is the Gaussian weight between character $i$ and $j$, $dis_{ij}$ is the distance between character $i$ and $j$, $\Phi (x)$ is the cumulative distribution function of Gaussian, $\sigma $ is the standard deviation of Gaussian function and it is a hyperparameter in our method  Equation (DISPLAY_FORM13) can ensure the Gaussian weight equals 1 when $dis_{ij}$ is 0  The larger distance between charactersis, the smaller the weight is, which makes one character can affect its adjacent characters more compared with other characters 
To combine the Gaussian weight to the self-attention, we produce the Hadamard product of Gaussian weight matrix $G$ and the score matrix produced by $Q{K^{T}}$
where $AG$ is the Gaussian-masked attention  It ensures that the relationship between two characters with long distances is weaker than adjacent characters 
The scaled dot-product attention models the relationship between two characters without regard to their distances in one sequence  For CWS task, the weight between adjacent characters should be more important while it is hard for self-attention to achieve the effect explicitly because the self-attention cannot get the order of sentences directly  The Gaussian-masked attention adjusts the weight between characters and their adjacent character to a larger value which stands for the effect of adjacent characters 
For forward and backward encoder, the self-attention sublayer needs to use a triangular matrix mask to let the self-attention focus on different weights:
where $pos_i$ is the position of character $c_i$  The triangular matrix for forward and backward encode are:
$\left[ \begin{matrix} 1 & 0 & 0 & \cdots &0\\ 1 & 1 & 0 & \cdots &0\\ 1 & 1 & 1 & \cdots &0\\ \vdots &\vdots &\vdots &\ddots &\vdots \\ 1 & 1 & 1 & \cdots & 1\\ \end{matrix} \right]$ $\left[ \begin{matrix} 1 & 1 & 1 & \cdots &1 \\ 0 & 1 & 1 & \cdots &1 \\ 0 & 0& 1 & \cdots &1 \\ \vdots &\vdots &\vdots &\ddots &\vdots \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & \cdots & 1\\ \end{matrix}\right]$
Similar as BIBREF24, we use multi-head attention to capture information from different dimension positions as Figure FIGREF16 and get Gaussian-masked directional multi-head attention  With multi-head attention architecture, the representation of input can be captured by
where $MH$ is the Gaussian-masked multi-head attention, ${W_i^q, W_i^k,W_i^v} \in \mathbb {R}^{d_k \times d_h}$ is the parameter matrices to generate heads, $d_k$ is the dimension of model and $d_h$ is the dimension of one head 
Models ::: Bi-affinal Attention Scorer
Regarding word boundaries as gaps between any adjacent words converts the character labeling task to the gap labeling task  Different from character labeling task, gap labeling task requires information of two adjacent characters  The relationship between adjacent characters can be represented as the type of gap  The characteristic of word boundaries makes bi-affine attention an appropriate scorer for CWS task 
Bi-affinal attention scorer is the component that we use to label the gap  Bi-affinal attention is developed from bilinear attention which has been used in dependency parsing BIBREF26 and SRL BIBREF27  The distribution of labels in a labeling task is often uneven which makes the output layer often include a fixed bias term for the prior probability of different labels BIBREF27  Bi-affine attention uses bias terms to alleviate the burden of the fixed bias term and get the prior probability which makes it different from bilinear attention  The distribution of the gap is uneven that is similar as other labeling task which fits bi-affine 
Bi-affinal attention scorer labels the target depending on information of independent unit and the joint information of two units  In bi-affinal attention, the score $s_{ij}$ of characters $c_i$ and $c_j$ $(i < j)$ is calculated by:
where $v_i^f$ is the forward information of $c_i$ and $v_i^b$ is the backward information of $c_j$  In Equation (DISPLAY_FORM21), $W$, $U$ and $b$ are all parameters that can be updated in training  $W$ is a matrix with shape $(d_i \times N\times d_j)$ and $U$ is a $(N\times (d_i + d_j))$ matrix where $d_i$ is the dimension of vector $v_i^f$ and $N$ is the number of labels 
In our model, the biaffine scorer uses the forward information of character in front of the gap and the backward information of the character behind the gap to distinguish the position of characters  Figure FIGREF22 is an example of labeling gap  The method of using biaffine scorer ensures that the boundaries of words can be determined by adjacent characters with different directional information  The score vector of the gap is formed by the probability of being a boundary of word  Further, the model generates all boundaries using activation function in a greedy decoding way 
Experiments ::: Experimental Settings ::: Data
We train and evaluate our model on datasets from SIGHAN Bakeoff 2005 BIBREF21 which has four datasets, PKU, MSR, AS and CITYU  Table TABREF23 shows the statistics of train data  We use F-score to evaluate CWS models  To train model with pre-trained embeddings in AS and CITYU, we use OpenCC to transfer data from traditional Chinese to simplified Chinese 
Experiments ::: Experimental Settings ::: Pre-trained Embedding
We only use unigram feature so we only trained character embeddings  Our pre-trained embedding are pre-trained on Chinese Wikipedia corpus by word2vec BIBREF29 toolkit  The corpus used for pre-trained embedding is all transferred to simplified Chinese and not segmented  On closed test, we use embeddings initialized randomly 
Experiments ::: Experimental Settings ::: Hyperparameters
For different datasets, we use two kinds of hyperparameters which are presented in Table TABREF24  We use hyperparameters in Table TABREF24 for small corpora (PKU and CITYU) and normal corpora (MSR and AS)  We set the standard deviation of Gaussian function in Equation (DISPLAY_FORM13) to 2  Each training batch contains sentences with at most 4096 tokens 
Experiments ::: Experimental Settings ::: Optimizer
To train our model, we use the Adam BIBREF30 optimizer with $\beta _1=0 9$, $\beta _2=0 98$ and $\epsilon =10^{-9}$  The learning rate schedule is the same as BIBREF24:
where $d$ is the dimension of embeddings, $step$ is the step number of training and $warmup_step$ is the step number of warmup  When the number of steps is smaller than the step of warmup, the learning rate increases linearly and then decreases 
Experiments ::: Hardware and Implements
We trained our models on a single CPU (Intel i7-5960X) with an nVidia 1080 Ti GPU  We implement our model in Python with Pytorch 1 0 
Experiments ::: Results
Tables TABREF25 and TABREF26 reports the performance of recent models and ours in terms of closed test setting  Without the assistance of unsupervised segmentation features userd in BIBREF20, our model outperforms all the other models in MSR and AS except BIBREF18 and get comparable performance in PKU and CITYU  Note that all the other models for this comparison adopt various $n$-gram features while only our model takes unigram ones 
With unsupervised segmentation features introduced by BIBREF20, our model gets a higher result  Specially, the results in MSR and AS achieve new state-of-the-art and approaching previous state-of-the-art in CITYU and PKU  The unsupervised segmentation features are derived from the given training dataset, thus using them does not violate the rule of closed test of SIGHAN Bakeoff 
Table TABREF36 compares our model and recent neural models in terms of open test setting in which any external resources, especially pre-trained embeddings or language models can be used  In MSR and AS, our model gets a comparable result while our results in CITYU and PKU are not remarkable 
However, it is well known that it is always hard to compare models when using open test setting, especially with pre-trained embedding  Not all models may use the same method and data to pre-train  Though pre-trained embedding or language model can improve the performance, the performance improvement itself may be from multiple sources  It often that there is a success of pre-trained embedding to improve the performance, while it cannot prove that the model is better 
Compared with other LSTM models, our model performs better in AS and MSR than in CITYU and PKU  Considering the scale of different corpora, we believe that the size of corpus affects our model and the larger size is, the better model performs  For small corpus, the model tends to be overfitting 
Tables TABREF25 and TABREF26 also show the decoding time in different datasets  Our model finishes the segmentation with the least decoding time in all four datasets, thanks to the architecture of model which only takes attention mechanism as basic block 
Related Work ::: Chinese Word Segmentation
CWS is a task for Chinese natural language process to delimit word boundary  BIBREF0 for the first time formulize CWS as a sequence labeling task  BIBREF3 show that different character tag sets can make essential impact for CWS  BIBREF2 use CRFs as a model for CWS, achieving new state-of-the-art  Works of statistical CWS has built the basis for neural CWS 
Neural word segmentation has been widely used to minimize the efforts in feature engineering which was important in statistical CWS  BIBREF4 introduce the neural model with sliding-window based sequence labeling  BIBREF6 propose a gated recursive neural network (GRNN) for CWS to incorporate complicated combination of contextual character and n-gram features  BIBREF7 use LSTM to learn long distance information  BIBREF9 propose a neural framework that eliminates context windows and utilize complete segmentation history  BIBREF33 explore a joint model that performs segmentation, POS-Tagging and chunking simultaneously  BIBREF34 propose a feature-enriched neural model for joint CWS and part-of-speech tagging  BIBREF35 present a joint model to enhance the segmentation of Chinese microtext by performing CWS and informal word detection simultaneously  BIBREF17 propose a character-based convolutional neural model to capture $n$-gram features automatically and an effective approach to incorporate word embeddings  BIBREF11 improve the model in BIBREF9 and propose a greedy neural word segmenter with balanced word and character embedding inputs  BIBREF23 propose a novel neural network model to incorporate unlabeled and partially-labeled data  BIBREF36 propose two methods that extend the Bi-LSTM to perform incorporating dictionaries into neural networks for CWS  BIBREF37 propose Switch-LSTMs to segment words and provided a more flexible solution for multi-criteria CWS which is easy to transfer the learned knowledge to new criteria 
Related Work ::: Transformer
Transformer BIBREF24 is an attention-based neural machine translation model  The Transformer is one kind of self-attention networks (SANs) which is proposed in BIBREF38  Encoder of the Transformer consists of one self-attention layer and a position-wise feed-forward layer  Decoder of the Transformer contains one self-attention layer, one encoder-decoder attention layer and one position-wise feed-forward layer  The Transformer uses residual connections around the sublayers and then followed by a layer normalization layer 
Scaled dot-product attention is the key component in the Transformer  The input of attention contains queries, keys, and values of input sequences  The attention is generated using queries and keys like Equation (DISPLAY_FORM11)  Structure of scaled dot-product attention allows the self-attention layer generate the representation of sentences at once and contain the information of the sentence which is different from RNN that process characters of sentences one by one  Standard self-attention is similar as Gaussian-masked direction attention while it does not have directional mask and gaussian mask  BIBREF24 also propose multi-head attention which is better to generate representation of sentence by dividing queries, keys and values to different heads and get information from different subspaces 
Conclusion
In this paper, we propose an attention mechanism only based Chinese word segmentation model  Our model uses self-attention from the Transformer encoder to take sequence input and bi-affine attention scorer to predict the label of gaps  To improve the ability of capturing the localness and directional information of self-attention based encoder, we propose a variant of self-attention called Gaussian-masked directional multi-head attention to replace the standard self-attention  We also extend the Transformer encoder to capture directional features  Our model uses only unigram features instead of multiple $n$-gram features in previous work  Our model is evaluated on standard benchmark dataset, SIGHAN Bakeoff 2005, which shows not only our model performs segmentation faster than any previous models but also gives new higher or comparable segmentation performance against previous state-of-the-art models 
Context 2: Introduction
The cognitive processes involved in human language comprehension are complex and only partially identified  According to the dual-stream model of speech comprehension BIBREF1 , sound waves are first converted to phoneme-like features and further processed by a ventral stream that maps those features onto words and semantic structures, and a dorsal stream that (among other things) supports audio-short term memory  The mapping of words onto meaning is thought to be subserved by widely distributed regions of the brain that specialize in particular modalities — for example visual aspects of the word banana reside in the occipital lobe of the brain and are activated when the word banana is heard BIBREF2 — and the different representation modalities are thought to be integrated into a single coherent latent representation in the anterior temporal lobe BIBREF3   While this part of meaning representation in human language comprehension is somewhat understood, much less is known about how the meanings of words are integrated together to form the meaning of sentences and discourses  One tool researchers use to study the integration of meaning across words is electroencephelography (EEG), which measures the electrical activity of large numbers of neurons acting in concert  EEG has the temporal resolution necessary to study the processes involved in meaning integration, and certain stereotyped electrical responses to word presentations, known as event-related potentials (ERPs), have been identified with some of the processes thought to contribute to comprehension 
In this work, we consider six ERP components that have been associated in the cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics literature with language processing and which we analyze in the data from BIBREF0 (see Figure FIGREF1 for spatial and temporal definitions of these ERP components)  Three of these — the N400, EPNP, and PNP responses — are primarily considered markers for semantic processing, while the other three — the P600, ELAN, and LAN responses — are primarily considered markers for syntactic processing  However, the neat division of the ERP responses into either semantic or syntactic categories is controversial  The N400 response has been very well studied (for an overview see BIBREF4 ) and it is well established that it is associated with semantic complexity, but the features of language that trigger the other ERP responses we consider here are poorly understood  We propose to use a neural network pretrained as a language model to probe what features of language drive these ERP responses, and in turn to probe what features of language mediate the cognitive processes that underlie human language comprehension, and especially the integration of meaning across words 
Background
While a full discussion of each ERP component and the features of language thought to trigger each are beyond the scope of this document (for reviews see e g  BIBREF0 , BIBREF2 , BIBREF4 , BIBREF5 , and BIBREF6 ), we introduce some basic features of ERP components to help in the discussion later  ERP components are electrical potential responses measured with respect to a baseline that are triggered by an event (in our case the presentation of a new word to a participant in an experiment)  The name of each ERP component reflects whether the potential is positive or negative relative to the baseline  The N400 is so-named because it is Negative relative to a baseline (the baseline is typically recorded just before a word is presented at an electrode that is not affected by the ERP response) and because it peaks in magnitude at about 400ms after a word is presented to a participant in an experiment  The P600 is Positive relative to a baseline and peaks around 600ms after a word is presented to a participant (though its overall duration is much longer and less specific in time than the N400)  The post-N400 positivity is so-named because it is part of a biphasic response; it is a positivity that occurs after the negativity associated with the N400  The early post-N400 positivity (EPNP) is also part of a biphasic response, but the positivity has an eariler onset than the standard PNP  Finally, the LAN and ELAN are the left-anterior negativity and early left-anterior negativity respectively  These are named for their timing, spatial distribution on the scalp, and direction of difference from the baseline  It is important to note that ERP components can potentially cancel and mask each other, and that it is difficult to precisely localize the neural activity that causes the changes in electrical potential at the electrodes where those changes are measured 
Related Work
This work is most closely related to the paper from which we get the ERP data: BIBREF0   In that work, the authors relate the surprisal of a word, i e  the (negative log) probability of the word appearing in its context, to each of the ERP signals we consider here  The authors do not directly train a model to predict ERPs  Instead, models of the probability distribution of each word in context are used to compute a surprisal for each word, which is input into a mixed effects regression along with word frequency, word length, word position in the sentence, and sentence position in the experiment  The effect of the surprisal is assessed using a likelihood-ratio test  In BIBREF7 , the authors take an approach similar to BIBREF0   The authors compare the explanatory power of surprisal (as computed by an LSTM or a Recurrent Neural Network Grammar (RNNG) language model) to a measure of syntactic complexity they call “distance" that counts the number of parser actions in the RNNG language model  The authors find that surprisal (as predicted by the RNNG) and distance are both significant factors in a mixed effects regression which predicts the P600, while the surprisal as computed by an LSTM is not  Unlike BIBREF0 and BIBREF7 , we do not use a linking function (e g  surprisal) to relate a language model to ERPs

ground_truth: pays attentions to adjacent characters and casts a localness relationship between the characters as a fixed Gaussian weight assuming the weight relies on the distance between characters

Gaussian-masked directional attention can be described as a function to map queries and key-value pairs to the representation of input, Gaussian-masked directional attention expects to pay attention to the adjacent characters of each positions and cast the localness relationship between characters as a fix Gaussian weight for attention, Gaussian weight only relys on the distance between characters

prompt_front: You are given a scientific article and a question. Answer the question as concisely as you can, using a single phrase or sentence if possible. If the question cannot be answered based on the information in the article, write "unanswerable". If the question is a yes/no question, answer "yes", "no", or "unanswerable". Do not provide any explanation.

Please answer the questions based on the text provided below. What datasets are used?
Context 2:  We thus lose the interpretability provided by the linking function, but we are able to predict a significant proportion of the variance for all of the ERP components, where prior work could not  We interpret our results through characterization of the ERPs in terms of how they relate to each other and to eye-tracking data rather than through a linking function  The authors in BIBREF8 also use a recurrent neural network to predict neural activity directly  In that work the authors predict magnetoencephalography (MEG) activity, a close cousin to EEG, recorded while participants read a chapter of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone BIBREF9   Their approach to characterization of processing at each MEG sensor location is to determine whether it is best predicted by the context vector of the recurrent network (prior to the current word being processed), the embedding of the current word, or the probability of the current word given the context  In future work we also intend to add these types of studies to the ERP predictions 
Discussion
In this work we find that all six of the ERP components from BIBREF0 can be predicted above chance by a model which has been pretrained using a language modeling objective and then directly trained to predict the components  This is in contrast to prior work which has successfully linked language models to the N400 BIBREF0 and P600 BIBREF7 but not the other ERP components  We also note that contrary to BIBREF7 , we find that an LSTM does contain information that can be used to predict EEG data, and in particular that it can predict the P600  We speculate that the analysis used in BIBREF7 did not find reliable effects because the language models were related to the EEG data through functions chosen a priori (the surprisal, and the `distance' metric)  These functions, though interpretable, might be interpretable at the cost of losing much of the information in the representations learned by the network 
In addition, we show through our multitask learning analysis that information is shared between ERP components, and between ERP components and behavioral data  Although these relationships must be viewed with caution until they can be verified across multiple datasets and with more variation in neural network architectures, here we consider some potential reasons for our findings  The broad point we wish to make is that by better understanding which ERP components share information with each other and with behavioral data through the type of analysis we present here (multitask learning) or other means, we can better understand what drives each ERP component and in turn the processes involved in human language comprehension 
Conclusion
We have shown that ERP components can be predicted from neural networks pretrained as language models and fine-tuned to directly predict those components  To the best of our knowledge, prior work has not successfully used statistical models to predict all of these components  Furthermore, we have shown that multitask learning benefits the prediction of ERP components and can suggest how components relate to each other  At present, these joint-training benefit relationships are only suggestive, but if these relationships ultimately lead to insights about what drives each ERP component, then the components become more useful tools for studying human language comprehension  By using multitask learning as a method of characterization, we have found some expected relationships (LAN+P600 and ELAN+P600) and several more surprising relationships  We believe that this is exactly the kind of finding that makes multitask learning an interesting exploratory technique in this area  Additionally, we have shown that information can be shared between heterogeneous types of data (eye-tracking, self-paced reading, and ERP components) in the domain of human language processing prediction, and in particular between behavioral and neural data  Given the small datasets associated with human language processing, using heterogeneous data is a potentially major advantage of a multitask approach  In future work, we will further explore what information is encoded into the model representations when neural and behavioral data are used to train neural networks, and how these representations differ from the representations in a model trained on language alone 
Acknowledgments
We thank our reviewers for their valuable feedback  This work is supported in part by National Institutes of Health grant number U01NS098969 
Appendix
Here we present a visualization (Figure FIGREF21 ) of the results presented in Table TABREF9 of the main paper, and a visualization (Figure FIGREF22 ) of a more complete set of results from which the information in Table TABREF16 of the main paper is drawn  We also show supplemental results for variants of our primary analysis on multitask learning with eye-tracking, self-paced reading time and ERP data  In the variants we modify the input representation to our decoder network to see whether the relationships between the behavioral data and neural activity appear to be consistent with different choices of encoder architectures  Additional (and more varied) choices or architectures are left to future work  The results in Table TABREF23 reflect using only the forward-encoder (rather than the bi-LSTM) in the encoder network, while the results in Table TABREF24 reflect using only the word embeddings (i e  bypassing the LSTM entirely)  While the results are clearly worse for each of these choices of architecture than for using a bi-LSTM encoder, the relationships between the behavioral data and the ERP signals is qualitatively similar  Finally, TABREF25 shows the Pearson correlation coefficient between different measures  We note that the patterns of correlation are different than the patterns of which measures benefit from joint training with each other 
Context 3: Introduction
In this publication, we present Sentence-BERT (SBERT), a modification of the BERT network using siamese and triplet networks that is able to derive semantically meaningful sentence embeddings  This enables BERT to be used for certain new tasks, which up-to-now were not applicable for BERT  These tasks include large-scale semantic similarity comparison, clustering, and information retrieval via semantic search 
BERT set new state-of-the-art performance on various sentence classification and sentence-pair regression tasks  BERT uses a cross-encoder: Two sentences are passed to the transformer network and the target value is predicted  However, this setup is unsuitable for various pair regression tasks due to too many possible combinations  Finding in a collection of $n=10\,000$ sentences the pair with the highest similarity requires with BERT $n\cdot (n-1)/2=49\,995\,000$ inference computations  On a modern V100 GPU, this requires about 65 hours  Similar, finding which of the over 40 million existent questions of Quora is the most similar for a new question could be modeled as a pair-wise comparison with BERT, however, answering a single query would require over 50 hours 
A common method to address clustering and semantic search is to map each sentence to a vector space such that semantically similar sentences are close  Researchers have started to input individual sentences into BERT and to derive fixed-size sentence embeddings  The most commonly used approach is to average the BERT output layer (known as BERT embeddings) or by using the output of the first token (the [CLS] token)  As we will show, this common practice yields rather bad sentence embeddings, often worse than averaging GloVe embeddings BIBREF2 
To alleviate this issue, we developed SBERT  The siamese network architecture enables that fixed-sized vectors for input sentences can be derived  Using a similarity measure like cosine-similarity or Manhatten / Euclidean distance, semantically similar sentences can be found  These similarity measures can be performed extremely efficient on modern hardware, allowing SBERT to be used for semantic similarity search as well as for clustering  The complexity for finding the most similar sentence pair in a collection of 10,000 sentences is reduced from 65 hours with BERT to the computation of 10,000 sentence embeddings (5 seconds with SBERT) and computing cosine-similarity (0 01 seconds)  By using optimized index structures, finding the most similar Quora question can be reduced from 50 hours to a few milliseconds BIBREF3 
We fine-tune SBERT on NLI data, which creates sentence embeddings that significantly outperform other state-of-the-art sentence embedding methods like InferSent BIBREF4 and Universal Sentence Encoder BIBREF5  On seven Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) tasks, SBERT achieves an improvement of 11 7 points compared to InferSent and 5 5 points compared to Universal Sentence Encoder  On SentEval BIBREF6, an evaluation toolkit for sentence embeddings, we achieve an improvement of 2 1 and 2 6 points, respectively 
SBERT can be adapted to a specific task  It sets new state-of-the-art performance on a challenging argument similarity dataset BIBREF7 and on a triplet dataset to distinguish sentences from different sections of a Wikipedia article BIBREF8 
The paper is structured in the following way: Section SECREF3 presents SBERT, section SECREF4 evaluates SBERT on common STS tasks and on the challenging Argument Facet Similarity (AFS) corpus BIBREF7  Section SECREF5 evaluates SBERT on SentEval  In section SECREF6, we perform an ablation study to test some design aspect of SBERT  In section SECREF7, we compare the computational efficiency of SBERT sentence embeddings in contrast to other state-of-the-art sentence embedding methods 
Related Work
We first introduce BERT, then, we discuss state-of-the-art sentence embedding methods 
BERT BIBREF0 is a pre-trained transformer network BIBREF9, which set for various NLP tasks new state-of-the-art results, including question answering, sentence classification, and sentence-pair regression  The input for BERT for sentence-pair regression consists of the two sentences, separated by a special [SEP] token  Multi-head attention over 12 (base-model) or 24 layers (large-model) is applied and the output is passed to a simple regression function to derive the final label  Using this setup, BERT set a new state-of-the-art performance on the Semantic Textual Semilarity (STS) benchmark BIBREF10  RoBERTa BIBREF1 showed, that the performance of BERT can further improved by small adaptations to the pre-training process  We also tested XLNet BIBREF11, but it led in general to worse results than BERT 
A large disadvantage of the BERT network structure is that no independent sentence embeddings are computed, which makes it difficult to derive sentence embeddings from BERT  To bypass this limitations, researchers passed single sentences through BERT and then derive a fixed sized vector by either averaging the outputs (similar to average word embeddings) or by using the output of the special CLS token (for example: bertsentenceembeddings1,bertsentenceembeddings2,bertsentenceembeddings3)  These two options are also provided by the popular bert-as-a-service-repository  Up to our knowledge, there is so far no evaluation if these methods lead to useful sentence embeddings 
Sentence embeddings are a well studied area with dozens of proposed methods  Skip-Thought BIBREF12 trains an encoder-decoder architecture to predict the surrounding sentences  InferSent BIBREF4 uses labeled data of the Stanford Natural Language Inference dataset BIBREF13 and the Multi-Genre NLI dataset BIBREF14 to train a siamese BiLSTM network with max-pooling over the output  Conneau et al  showed, that InferSent consistently outperforms unsupervised methods like SkipThought  Universal Sentence Encoder BIBREF5 trains a transformer network and augments unsupervised learning with training on SNLI  hill-etal-2016-learning showed, that the task on which sentence embeddings are trained significantly impacts their quality  Previous work BIBREF4, BIBREF5 found that the SNLI datasets are suitable for training sentence embeddings  yang-2018-learning presented a method to train on conversations from Reddit using siamese DAN and siamese transformer networks, which yielded good results on the STS benchmark dataset 
polyencoders addresses the run-time overhead of the cross-encoder from BERT and present a method (poly-encoders) to compute a score between $m$ context vectors and pre-computed candidate embeddings using attention  This idea works for finding the highest scoring sentence in a larger collection  However, poly-encoders have the drawback that the score function is not symmetric and the computational overhead is too large for use-cases like clustering, which would require $O(n^2)$ score computations 
Previous neural sentence embedding methods started the training from a random initialization  In this publication, we use the pre-trained BERT and RoBERTa network and only fine-tune it to yield useful sentence embeddings  This reduces significantly the needed training time: SBERT can be tuned in less than 20 minutes, while yielding better results than comparable sentence embedding methods 
Model
SBERT adds a pooling operation to the output of BERT / RoBERTa to derive a fixed sized sentence embedding  We experiment with three pooling strategies: Using the output of the CLS-token, computing the mean of all output vectors (MEAN-strategy), and computing a max-over-time of the output vectors (MAX-strategy)  The default configuration is MEAN 
In order to fine-tune BERT / RoBERTa, we create siamese and triplet networks BIBREF15 to update the weights such that the produced sentence embeddings are semantically meaningful and can be compared with cosine-similarity 
The network structure depends on the available training data  We experiment with the following structures and objective functions 
Classification Objective Function  We concatenate the sentence embeddings $u$ and $v$ with the element-wise difference $|u-v|$ and multiply it with the trainable weight $W_t \in \mathbb {R}^{3n \times k}$:
where $n$ is the dimension of the sentence embeddings and $k$ the number of labels  We optimize cross-entropy loss  This structure is depicted in Figure FIGREF4 
Regression Objective Function  The cosine-similarity between the two sentence embeddings $u$ and $v$ is computed (Figure FIGREF5)  We use mean-squared-error loss as the objective function 
Triplet Objective Function  Given an anchor sentence $a$, a positive sentence $p$, and a negative sentence $n$, triplet loss tunes the network such that the distance between $a$ and $p$ is smaller than the distance between $a$ and $n$  Mathematically, we minimize the following loss function:
with $s_x$ the sentence embedding for $a$/$n$/$p$, $||\cdot ||$ a distance metric and margin $\epsilon $  Margin $\epsilon $ ensures that $s_p$ is at least $\epsilon $ closer to $s_a$ than $s_n$  As metric we use Euclidean distance and we set $\epsilon =1$ in our experiments 
Model ::: Training Details
We train SBERT on the combination of the SNLI BIBREF13 and the Multi-Genre NLI BIBREF14 dataset  The SNLI is a collection of 570,000 sentence pairs annotated with the labels contradiction, eintailment, and neutral  MultiNLI contains 430,000 sentence pairs and covers a range of genres of spoken and written text  We fine-tune SBERT with a 3-way softmax-classifier objective function for one epoch  We used a batch-size of 16, Adam optimizer with learning rate $2\mathrm {e}{-5}$, and a linear learning rate warm-up over 10% of the training data  Our default pooling strategy is MEAN 
Evaluation - Semantic Textual Similarity
We evaluate the performance of SBERT for common Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) tasks  State-of-the-art methods often learn a (complex) regression function that maps sentence embeddings to a similarity score  However, these regression functions work pair-wise and due to the combinatorial explosion those are often not scalable if the collection of sentences reaches a certain size  Instead, we always use cosine-similarity to compare the similarity between two sentence embeddings  We ran our experiments also with negative Manhatten and negative Euclidean distances as similarity measures, but the results for all approaches remained roughly the same 
Evaluation - Semantic Textual Similarity ::: Unsupervised STS
We evaluate the performance of SBERT for STS without using any STS specific training data  We use the STS tasks 2012 - 2016 BIBREF16, BIBREF17, BIBREF18, BIBREF19, BIBREF20, the STS benchmark BIBREF10, and the SICK-Relatedness dataset BIBREF21  These datasets provide labels between 0 and 5 on the semantic relatedness of sentence pairs  We showed in BIBREF22 that Pearson correlation is badly suited for STS  Instead, we compute the Spearman's rank correlation between the cosine-similarity of the sentence embeddings and the gold labels  The setup for the other sentence embedding methods is equivalent, the similarity is computed by cosine-similarity  The results are depicted in Table TABREF6 
The results shows that directly using the output of BERT leads to rather poor performances  Averaging the BERT embeddings achieves an average correlation of only 54 81, and using the CLS-token output only achieves an average correlation of 29 19  Both are worse than computing average GloVe embeddings 
Using the described siamese network structure and fine-tuning mechanism substantially improves the correlation, outperforming both InferSent and Universal Sentence Encoder substantially  The only dataset where SBERT performs worse than Universal Sentence Encoder is SICK-R  Universal Sentence Encoder was trained on various datasets, including news, question-answer pages and discussion forums, which appears to be more suitable to the data of SICK-R  In contrast, SBERT was pre-trained only on Wikipedia (via BERT) and on NLI data 
While RoBERTa was able to improve the performance for several supervised tasks, we only observe minor difference between SBERT and SRoBERTa for generating sentence embeddings 
Evaluation - Semantic Textual Similarity ::: Supervised STS
The STS benchmark (STSb) BIBREF10 provides is a popular dataset to evaluate supervised STS systems  The data includes 8,628 sentence pairs from the three categories captions, news, and forums  It is divided into train (5,749), dev (1,500) and test (1,379)  BERT set a new state-of-the-art performance on this dataset by passing both sentences to the network and using a simple regression method for the output 
We use the training set to fine-tune SBERT using the regression objective function  At prediction time, we compute the cosine-similarity between the sentence embeddings  All systems are trained with 10 random seeds to counter variances BIBREF23 
The results are depicted in Table TABREF10  We experimented with two setups: Only training on STSb, and first training on NLI, then training on STSb  We observe that the later strategy leads to a slight improvement of 1-2 points  This two-step approach had an especially large impact for the BERT cross-encoder, which improved the performance by 3-4 points  We do not observe a significant difference between BERT and RoBERTa 
Evaluation - Semantic Textual Similarity ::: Argument Facet Similarity
We evaluate SBERT on the Argument Facet Similarity (AFS) corpus by MisraEW16  The AFS corpus annotated 6,000 sentential argument pairs from social media dialogs on three controversial topics: gun control, gay marriage, and death penalty  The data was annotated on a scale from 0 (“different topic") to 5 (“completely equivalent")  The similarity notion in the AFS corpus is fairly different to the similarity notion in the STS datasets from SemEval  STS data is usually descriptive, while AFS data are argumentative excerpts from dialogs  To be considered similar, arguments must not only make similar claims, but also provide a similar reasoning

ground_truth: Answer with content missing: (Whole Method and Results sections) The primary dataset we use is the ERP data collected and computed by Frank et al. (2015), and we also use behavioral data (eye-tracking data and self-paced reading times) from Frank et al. (2013) which were collected on the same set of 205 sentences.
Select:
- ERP data collected and computed by Frank et al. (2015)
- behavioral data (eye-tracking data and self-paced reading times) from Frank et al. (2013)

the ERP data: BIBREF0

prompt_front: You are given a scientific article and a question. Answer the question as concisely as you can, using a single phrase or sentence if possible. If the question cannot be answered based on the information in the article, write "unanswerable". If the question is a yes/no question, answer "yes", "no", or "unanswerable". Do not provide any explanation.

Please answer the questions based on the text provided below. What other sentence embeddings methods are evaluated?
Context 3:  Further, the lexical gap between the sentences in AFS is much larger  Hence, simple unsupervised methods as well as state-of-the-art STS systems perform badly on this dataset BIBREF24 
We evaluate SBERT on this dataset in two scenarios: 1) As proposed by Misra et al , we evaluate SBERT using 10-fold cross-validation  A draw-back of this evaluation setup is that it is not clear how well approaches generalize to different topics  Hence, 2) we evaluate SBERT in a cross-topic setup  Two topics serve for training and the approach is evaluated on the left-out topic  We repeat this for all three topics and average the results 
SBERT is fine-tuned using the Regression Objective Function  The similarity score is computed using cosine-similarity based on the sentence embeddings  We also provide the Pearson correlation $r$ to make the results comparable to Misra et al  However, we showed BIBREF22 that Pearson correlation has some serious drawbacks and should be avoided for comparing STS systems  The results are depicted in Table TABREF12 
Unsupervised methods like tf-idf, average GloVe embeddings or InferSent perform rather badly on this dataset with low scores  Training SBERT in the 10-fold cross-validation setup gives a performance that is nearly on-par with BERT 
However, in the cross-topic evaluation, we observe a performance drop of SBERT by about 7 points Spearman correlation  To be considered similar, arguments should address the same claims and provide the same reasoning  BERT is able to use attention to compare directly both sentences (e g  word-by-word comparison), while SBERT must map individual sentences from an unseen topic to a vector space such that arguments with similar claims and reasons are close  This is a much more challenging task, which appears to require more than just two topics for training to work on-par with BERT 
Evaluation - Semantic Textual Similarity ::: Wikipedia Sections Distinction
ein-dor-etal-2018-learning use Wikipedia to create a thematically fine-grained train, dev and test set for sentence embeddings methods  Wikipedia articles are separated into distinct sections focusing on certain aspects  Dor et al  assume that sentences in the same section are thematically closer than sentences in different sections  They use this to create a large dataset of weakly labeled sentence triplets: The anchor and the positive example come from the same section, while the negative example comes from a different section of the same article  For example, from the Alice Arnold article: Anchor: Arnold joined the BBC Radio Drama Company in 1988 , positive: Arnold gained media attention in May 2012 , negative: Balding and Arnold are keen amateur golfers 
We use the dataset from Dor et al  We use the Triplet Objective, train SBERT for one epoch on the about 1 8 Million training triplets and evaluate it on the 222,957 test triplets  Test triplets are from a distinct set of Wikipedia articles  As evaluation metric, we use accuracy: Is the positive example closer to the anchor than the negative example?
Results are presented in Table TABREF14  Dor et al  fine-tuned a BiLSTM architecture with triplet loss to derive sentence embeddings for this dataset  As the table shows, SBERT clearly outperforms the BiLSTM approach by Dor et al 
Evaluation - SentEval
SentEval BIBREF6 is a popular toolkit to evaluate the quality of sentence embeddings  Sentence embeddings are used as features for a logistic regression classifier  The logistic regression classifier is trained on various tasks in a 10-fold cross-validation setup and the prediction accuracy is computed for the test-fold 
The purpose of SBERT sentence embeddings are not to be used for transfer learning for other tasks  Here, we think fine-tuning BERT as described by devlin2018bert for new tasks is the more suitable method, as it updates all layers of the BERT network  However, SentEval can still give an impression on the quality of our sentence embeddings for various tasks 
We compare the SBERT sentence embeddings to other sentence embeddings methods on the following seven SentEval transfer tasks:
MR: Sentiment prediction for movie reviews snippets on a five start scale BIBREF25 
CR: Sentiment prediction of customer product reviews BIBREF26 
SUBJ: Subjectivity prediction of sentences from movie reviews and plot summaries BIBREF27 
MPQA: Phrase level opinion polarity classification from newswire BIBREF28 
SST: Stanford Sentiment Treebank with binary labels BIBREF29 
TREC: Fine grained question-type classification from TREC BIBREF30 
MRPC: Microsoft Research Paraphrase Corpus from parallel news sources BIBREF31 
The results can be found in Table TABREF15  SBERT is able to achieve the best performance in 5 out of 7 tasks  The average performance increases by about 2 percentage points compared to InferSent as well as the Universal Sentence Encoder  Even though transfer learning is not the purpose of SBERT, it outperforms other state-of-the-art sentence embeddings methods on this task 
It appears that the sentence embeddings from SBERT capture well sentiment information: We observe large improvements for all sentiment tasks (MR, CR, and SST) from SentEval in comparison to InferSent and Universal Sentence Encoder 
The only dataset where SBERT is significantly worse than Universal Sentence Encoder is the TREC dataset  Universal Sentence Encoder was pre-trained on question-answering data, which appears to be beneficial for the question-type classification task of the TREC dataset 
Average BERT embeddings or using the CLS-token output from a BERT network achieved bad results for various STS tasks (Table TABREF6), worse than average GloVe embeddings  However, for SentEval, average BERT embeddings and the BERT CLS-token output achieves decent results (Table TABREF15), outperforming average GloVe embeddings  The reason for this are the different setups  For the STS tasks, we used cosine-similarity to estimate the similarities between sentence embeddings  Cosine-similarity treats all dimensions equally  In contrast, SentEval fits a logistic regression classifier to the sentence embeddings  This allows that certain dimensions can have higher or lower impact on the classification result 
We conclude that average BERT embeddings / CLS-token output from BERT return sentence embeddings that are infeasible to be used with cosine-similarity or with Manhatten / Euclidean distance  For transfer learning, they yield slightly worse results than InferSent or Universal Sentence Encoder  However, using the described fine-tuning setup with a siamese network structure on NLI datasets yields sentence embeddings that achieve a new state-of-the-art for the SentEval toolkit 
Ablation Study
We have demonstrated strong empirical results for the quality of SBERT sentence embeddings  In this section, we perform an ablation study of different aspects of SBERT in order to get a better understanding of their relative importance 
We evaluated different pooling strategies (MEAN, MAX, and CLS)  For the classification objective function, we evaluate different concatenation methods  For each possible configuration, we train SBERT with 10 different random seeds and average the performances 
The objective function (classification vs  regression) depends on the annotated dataset  For the classification objective function, we train SBERT-base on the SNLI and the Multi-NLI dataset  For the regression objective function, we train on the training set of the STS benchmark dataset  Performances are measured on the development split of the STS benchmark dataset  Results are shown in Table TABREF23 
When trained with the classification objective function on NLI data, the pooling strategy has a rather minor impact  The impact of the concatenation mode is much larger  InferSent BIBREF4 and Universal Sentence Encoder BIBREF5 both use $(u, v, |u-v|, u*v)$ as input for a softmax classifier  However, in our architecture, adding the element-wise $u*v$ decreased the performance 
The most important component is the element-wise difference $|u-v|$  Note, that the concatenation mode is only relevant for training the softmax classifier  At inference, when predicting similarities for the STS benchmark dataset, only the sentence embeddings $u$ and $v$ are used in combination with cosine-similarity  The element-wise difference measures the distance between the dimensions of the two sentence embeddings, ensuring that similar pairs are closer and dissimilar pairs are further apart 
When trained with the regression objective function, we observe that the pooling strategy has a large impact  There, the MAX strategy perform significantly worse than MEAN or CLS-token strategy  This is in contrast to BIBREF4, who found it beneficial for the BiLSTM-layer of InferSent to use MAX instead of MEAN pooling 
Computational Efficiency
Sentence embeddings need potentially be computed for Millions of sentences, hence, a high computation speed is desired  In this section, we compare SBERT to average GloVe embeddings, InferSent BIBREF4, and Universal Sentence Encoder BIBREF5 
For our comparison we use the sentences from the STS benchmark BIBREF10  We compute average GloVe embeddings using a simple for-loop with python dictionary lookups and NumPy  InferSent is based on PyTorch  For Universal Sentence Encoder, we use the TensorFlow Hub version, which is based on TensorFlow  SBERT is based on PyTorch  For improved computation of sentence embeddings, we implemented a smart batching strategy: Sentences with similar lengths are grouped together and are only padded to the longest element in a mini-batch  This drastically reduces computational overhead from padding tokens 
Performances were measured on a server with Intel i7-5820K CPU @ 3 30GHz, Nvidia Tesla V100 GPU, CUDA 9 2 and cuDNN  The results are depicted in Table TABREF26 
On CPU, InferSent is about 65% faster than SBERT  This is due to the much simpler network architecture  InferSent uses a single BiLSTM layer, while BERT uses 12 stacked transformer layers  However, an advantage of transformer networks is the computational efficiency on GPUs  There, SBERT with smart batching is about 9% faster than InferSent and about 55% faster than Universal Sentence Encoder  Smart batching achieves a speed-up of 89% on CPU and 48% on GPU  Average GloVe embeddings is obviously by a large margin the fastest method to compute sentence embeddings 
Conclusion
We showed that BERT out-of-the-box maps sentences to a vector space that is rather unsuitable to be used with common similarity measures like cosine-similarity  The performance for seven STS tasks was below the performance of average GloVe embeddings 
To overcome this shortcoming, we presented Sentence-BERT (SBERT)  SBERT fine-tunes BERT in a siamese / triplet network architecture  We evaluated the quality on various common benchmarks, where it could achieve a significant improvement over state-of-the-art sentence embeddings methods  Replacing BERT with RoBERTa did not yield a significant improvement in our experiments 
SBERT is computationally efficient  On a GPU, it is about 9% faster than InferSent and about 55% faster than Universal Sentence Encoder  SBERT can be used for tasks which are computationally not feasible to be modeled with BERT  For example, clustering of 10,000 sentences with hierarchical clustering requires with BERT about 65 hours, as around 50 Million sentence combinations must be computed  With SBERT, we were able to reduce the effort to about 5 seconds 
Acknowledgments
This work has been supported by the German Research Foundation through the German-Israeli Project Cooperation (DIP, grant DA 1600/1-1 and grant GU 798/17-1)  It has been co-funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the promotional references 03VP02540 (ArgumenText) 

ground_truth: GloVe, BERT, Universal Sentence Encoder, TF-IDF, InferSent

Avg. GloVe embeddings, Avg. fast-text embeddings, Avg. BERT embeddings, BERT CLS-vector, InferSent - GloVe and Universal Sentence Encoder.