# Extracting Similar Questions From Naturally-occurring Business Conversations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.01585 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01585/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 7 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [A large annotated corpus for learning natural language inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.05326/) (2015)
- [SemEval-2017 Task 1: Semantic Textual Similarity - Multilingual and Cross-lingual Focused Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00055/) (2017)
- [How Contextual are Contextualized Word Representations? Comparing the Geometry of BERT, ELMo, and GPT-2 Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00512/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pre-trained contextualized embedding models such as BERT are a standard building block in many natural language processing systems. We demonstrate that the sentence-level representations produced by some off-the-shelf contextualized embedding models have a narrow distribution in the embedding space, and thus perform poorly for the task of identifying semantically similar questions in real-world English business conversations. We describe a method that uses appropriately tuned representations and a small set of exemplars to group questions of interest to business users in a visualization that can be used for data exploration or employee coaching.