Semantic Sentence Matching via Interacting Syntax Graphs

Studies have shown that the sentence’s syntactic structures are important for semantic sentence matching. A typical approach is encoding each sentence’s syntactic structure into an embedding vector, which can be combined with other features to predict the final matching scores. Though successes have been observed, embedding the whole syntactic structures as one vector inevitably overlooks the fine-grained syntax matching patterns, e.g. the alignment of specific term dependencies relations in the two inputted sentences. In this paper, we formalize the task of semantic sentence matching as a problem of graph matching in which each sentence is represented as a directed graph according to its syntactic structures. The syntax matching patterns (i.e. similar syntactic structures) between two sentences, therefore, can be extracted as the sub-graph structure alignments. The proposed method, referred to as Interacted Syntax Graphs (ISG), represents two sentences’ syntactic alignments as well as their semantic matching signals into one association graph. After that, the neural quadratic assignment programming (QAP) is adapted to extract syntactic matching patterns from the association graph. In this way, the syntactic structures fully interact in a fine granularity during the matching process. Experimental results on three public datasets demonstrated that ISG can outperform the state-of-the-art baselines effectively and efficiently. The empirical analysis also showed that ISG can match sentences in an interpretable way.