DefSent: Sentence Embeddings using Definition Sentences

Understand

Sentence embedding methods using natural language inference (NLI) datasets have been successfully applied to various tasks.

• However, these methods are only available for limited languages due to relying heavily on the large NLI datasets.
• In this paper, we propose DefSent, a sentence embedding method that uses definition sentences from a word dictionary, which performs comparably on unsupervised semantics textual similarity (STS) tasks and slightly better on SentEval tasks than conventional methods.
• Since dictionaries are available for many languages, DefSent is more broadly applicable than methods using NLI datasets without constructing additional datasets.