DRr-Net: Dynamic re-read network for sentence semantic matching

Abstract

Sentence semantic matching requires an agent to determine the semantic relation between two sentences, which is widely used in various natural language tasks such as Natural Language Inference (NLI) and Paraphrase Identification (PI). Among all matching methods, attention mechanism plays an important role in capturing the semantic relations and properly aligning the elements of two sentences. Previous methods utilized attention mechanism to select important parts of sentences at one time. However, the important parts of the sentence during semantic matching are dynamically changing with the degree of sentence understanding. Selecting the important parts at one time may be insufficient for semantic understanding. To this end, we propose a Dynamic Re-read Network (DRr-Net) approach for sentence semantic matching, which is able to pay close attention to a small region of sentences at each step and re-read the important words for better sentence semantic understanding. To be specific, we first employ Attention Stack-GRU (ASG) unit to model the original sentence repeatedly and preserve all the information from bottom-most word embedding input to up-most recurrent output. Second, we utilize Dynamic Re-read (DRr) unit to pay close attention to one important word at one time with the consideration of learned information and re-read the important words for better sentence semantic understanding. Extensive experiments on three sentence matching benchmark datasets demonstrate that DRr-Net has the ability to model sentence semantic more precisely and significantly improve the performance of sentence semantic matching. In addition, it is very interesting that some of finding in our experiments are consistent with the findings of psychological research.