Modeling Sentences in the Latent Space

Sentence Similarity is the process of computing a similarity score between two sentences. Previous sentence similarity work finds that latent semantics approaches to the problem do not perform well due to insufficient information in single sentences. In this paper, we show that by carefully handling words that are not in the sentences (missing words), we can train a reliable latent variable model on sentences. In the process, we propose a new evaluation framework for sentence similarity: Concept Definition Retrieval. The new framework allows for large scale tuning and testing of Sentence Similarity models. Experiments on the new task and previous data sets show significant improvement of our model over baselines and other traditional latent variable models. Our results indicate comparable and even better performance than current state of the art systems addressing the problem of sentence similarity.