---
pipeline_tag: sentence-similarity
language:
  - ar
  - de
  - en
  - es
  - fr
  - it
  - ja
  - ko
  - nl
  - pl
  - pt
  - ru
  - th
  - tr
  - zh
tags:
  - bert
  - sentence_embedding
  - multilingual
  - google
  - sentence-similarity
  - labse
license: apache-2.0
datasets:
  - CommonCrawl
  - Wikipedia
---

# LaBSE

## Model description

Smaller Language-agnostic BERT Sentence Encoder (LaBSE) is a BERT-based model distilled from the [original LaBSE model](https://huggingface.co/setu4993/LaBSE) to 15 languages (from the original 109 languages) using the techniques described in the paper ['Load What You Need: Smaller Versions of Multilingual BERT'](https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.05609) by [Ukjae Jeong](https://github.com/jeongukjae/).

- Model: [HuggingFace's model hub](https://huggingface.co/setu4993/smaller-LaBSE).
- Original model: [TensorFlow Hub](https://tfhub.dev/jeongukjae/smaller_LaBSE_15lang/1).
- Distillation source: [GitHub](https://github.com/jeongukjae/smaller-labse).
- Conversion from TensorFlow to PyTorch: [GitHub](https://github.com/setu4993/convert-labse-tf-pt).

## Usage

Using the model:

```python
import torch
from transformers import BertModel, BertTokenizerFast


tokenizer = BertTokenizerFast.from_pretrained("setu4993/smaller-LaBSE")
model = BertModel.from_pretrained("setu4993/smaller-LaBSE")
model = model.eval()

english_sentences = [
    "dog",
    "Puppies are nice.",
    "I enjoy taking long walks along the beach with my dog.",
]
english_inputs = tokenizer(english_sentences, return_tensors="pt", padding=True)

with torch.no_grad():
    english_outputs = model(**english_inputs)
```

To get the sentence embeddings, use the pooler output:

```python
english_embeddings = english_outputs.pooler_output
```

Output for other languages:

```python
italian_sentences = [
    "cane",
    "I cuccioli sono carini.",
    "Mi piace fare lunghe passeggiate lungo la spiaggia con il mio cane.",
]
japanese_sentences = ["犬", "子犬はいいです", "私は犬と一緒にビーチを散歩するのが好きです"]
italian_inputs = tokenizer(italian_sentences, return_tensors="pt", padding=True)
japanese_inputs = tokenizer(japanese_sentences, return_tensors="pt", padding=True)

with torch.no_grad():
    italian_outputs = model(**italian_inputs)
    japanese_outputs = model(**japanese_inputs)

italian_embeddings = italian_outputs.pooler_output
japanese_embeddings = japanese_outputs.pooler_output
```

For similarity between sentences, an L2-norm is recommended before calculating the similarity:

```python
import torch.nn.functional as F


def similarity(embeddings_1, embeddings_2):
    normalized_embeddings_1 = F.normalize(embeddings_1, p=2)
    normalized_embeddings_2 = F.normalize(embeddings_2, p=2)
    return torch.matmul(
        normalized_embeddings_1, normalized_embeddings_2.transpose(0, 1)
    )


print(similarity(english_embeddings, italian_embeddings))
print(similarity(english_embeddings, japanese_embeddings))
print(similarity(italian_embeddings, japanese_embeddings))
```

## Details

Details about data, training, evaluation and performance metrics are available in the [original paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.01852).

### BibTeX entry and citation info

```bibtex
@misc{feng2020languageagnostic,
      title={Language-agnostic BERT Sentence Embedding},
      author={Fangxiaoyu Feng and Yinfei Yang and Daniel Cer and Naveen Arivazhagan and Wei Wang},
      year={2020},
      eprint={2007.01852},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL}
}
```