Semantic Text Matching Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract: Semantic text matching is a fundamental task for many applications in NaturalLanguage Processing (NLP). Traditional methods using term frequencyinversedocument frequency (TF-IDF) to match exact words in documentshave one strong drawback which is TF-IDF is unable to capture semanticrelations between closely-related words which will lead to a disappointingmatching result. Neural networks have recently been used for various applicationsin NLP, and achieved state-of-the-art performances on many tasks.Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) have been tested on text classificationand text matching, but it did not gain any remarkable results, which is dueto RNNs working more effectively on texts with a short length, but longdocuments. In this paper, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) will beapplied to match texts in a semantic aspect. It uses word embedding representationsof two texts as inputs to the CNN construction to extract thesemantic features between the two texts and give a score as the output ofhow certain the CNN model is that they match. The results show that aftersome tuning of the parameters the CNN model could produce accuracy,prediction, recall and F1-scores all over 80%. This is a great improvementover the previous TF-IDF results and further improvements could be madeby using dynamic word vectors, better pre-processing of the data, generatelarger and more feature rich data sets and further tuning of the parameters.