ACV-tree: A New Method for Sentence Similarity Modeling.

Sentence similarity modeling lies at the core of many natural language processing applications, and thus has received much attention. Owing to the success of word embeddings, recently, popular neural network methods have achieved sentence embedding, obtaining attractive performance. Nevertheless, most of them focused on learning semantic information and modeling it as a continuous vector, while the syntactic information of sentences has not been fully exploited. On the other hand, prior works have shown the benefits of structured trees that include syntactic information, while few methods in this branch utilized the advantages of word embeddings and another powerful technique - attention weight mechanism. This paper makes the first attempt to absorb their advantages by merging these techniques in a unified structure, dubbed as ACV-tree. Meanwhile, this paper develops a new tree kernel, known as ACVT kernel, that is tailored for sentence similarity measure based on the proposed structure. The experimental results, based on 19 widely-used datasets, demonstrate that our model is effective and competitive, compared against state-of-the-art models.