---
pipeline_tag: sentence-similarity
tags:
- sentence-transformers
- feature-extraction
- sentence-similarity
- transformers
---

# msmarco-distilbert-cos-v5
This is a [sentence-transformers](https://www.SBERT.net) model: It maps sentences & paragraphs to a 768 dimensional dense vector space and was designed for **semantic search**. It has been trained on 500k (query, answer) pairs from the [MS MARCO Passages dataset](https://github.com/microsoft/MSMARCO-Passage-Ranking). For an introduction to semantic search, have a look at: [SBERT.net - Semantic Search](https://www.sbert.net/examples/applications/semantic-search/README.html)


## Usage (Sentence-Transformers)
Using this model becomes easy when you have [sentence-transformers](https://www.SBERT.net) installed:

```
pip install -U sentence-transformers
```

Then you can use the model like this:
```python
from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer, util

query = "How many people live in London?"
docs = ["Around 9 Million people live in London", "London is known for its financial district"]

#Load the model
model = SentenceTransformer('sentence-transformers/msmarco-distilbert-cos-v5')

#Encode query and documents
query_emb = model.encode(query)
doc_emb = model.encode(docs)

#Compute dot score between query and all document embeddings
scores = util.dot_score(query_emb, doc_emb)[0].cpu().tolist()

#Combine docs & scores
doc_score_pairs = list(zip(docs, scores))

#Sort by decreasing score
doc_score_pairs = sorted(doc_score_pairs, key=lambda x: x[1], reverse=True)

#Output passages & scores
for doc, score in doc_score_pairs:
    print(score, doc)
```


## Usage (HuggingFace Transformers)
Without [sentence-transformers](https://www.SBERT.net), you can use the model like this: First, you pass your input through the transformer model, then you have to apply the correct pooling-operation on-top of the contextualized word embeddings.

```python
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModel
import torch
import torch.nn.functional as F

#Mean Pooling - Take average of all tokens
def mean_pooling(model_output, attention_mask):
    token_embeddings = model_output.last_hidden_state #First element of model_output contains all token embeddings
    input_mask_expanded = attention_mask.unsqueeze(-1).expand(token_embeddings.size()).float()
    return torch.sum(token_embeddings * input_mask_expanded, 1) / torch.clamp(input_mask_expanded.sum(1), min=1e-9)


#Encode text
def encode(texts):
    # Tokenize sentences
    encoded_input = tokenizer(texts, padding=True, truncation=True, return_tensors='pt')

    # Compute token embeddings
    with torch.no_grad():
        model_output = model(**encoded_input, return_dict=True)

    # Perform pooling
    embeddings = mean_pooling(model_output, encoded_input['attention_mask'])

    # Normalize embeddings
    embeddings = F.normalize(embeddings, p=2, dim=1)
	
    return embeddings


# Sentences we want sentence embeddings for
query = "How many people live in London?"
docs = ["Around 9 Million people live in London", "London is known for its financial district"]

# Load model from HuggingFace Hub
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("sentence-transformers/msmarco-distilbert-cos-v5")
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained("sentence-transformers/msmarco-distilbert-cos-v5")

#Encode query and docs
query_emb = encode(query)
doc_emb = encode(docs)

#Compute dot score between query and all document embeddings
scores = torch.mm(query_emb, doc_emb.transpose(0, 1))[0].cpu().tolist()

#Combine docs & scores
doc_score_pairs = list(zip(docs, scores))

#Sort by decreasing score
doc_score_pairs = sorted(doc_score_pairs, key=lambda x: x[1], reverse=True)

#Output passages & scores
for doc, score in doc_score_pairs:
    print(score, doc)
```

## Technical Details

In the following some technical details how this model must be used:

| Setting | Value |
| --- | :---: |
| Dimensions | 768 |
| Produces normalized embeddings | Yes |
| Pooling-Method | Mean pooling |
| Suitable score functions | dot-product (`util.dot_score`), cosine-similarity (`util.cos_sim`), or euclidean distance |

Note: When loaded with `sentence-transformers`, this model produces normalized embeddings with length 1. In that case, dot-product and cosine-similarity are equivalent. dot-product is preferred as it is faster. Euclidean distance is proportional to dot-product and can also be used.

## Citing & Authors

This model was trained by [sentence-transformers](https://www.sbert.net/). 
        
If you find this model helpful, feel free to cite our publication [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10084):
```bibtex 
@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 = "http://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10084",
}
```