# Efficient comparison of sentence embeddings

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.00820 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00820/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [FastText.zip: Compressing text classification models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03651/) (2016)
- [Efficient Large-scale Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search on the GPU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05911/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Transformer Based Implementation for Automatic Book Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07057/) (2023)
- [LinkedIn Post Embeddings: Industrial Scale Embedding Generation and Usage across LinkedIn](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11344/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The domain of natural language processing (NLP), which has greatly evolved over the last years, has highly benefited from the recent developments in word and sentence embeddings. Such embeddings enable the transformation of complex NLP tasks, like semantic similarity or Question and Answering (Q&A), into much simpler to perform vector comparisons. However, such a problem transformation raises new challenges like the efficient comparison of embeddings and their manipulation. In this work, we will discuss about various word and sentence embeddings algorithms, we will select a sentence embedding algorithm, BERT, as our algorithm of choice and we will evaluate the performance of two vector comparison approaches, FAISS and Elasticsearch, in the specific problem of sentence embeddings. According to the results, FAISS outperforms Elasticsearch when used in a centralized environment with only one node, especially when big datasets are included.