# Ranking-Enhanced Unsupervised Sentence Representation Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.04333 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04333/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09118/) (2021)
- [Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06724/) (2015)
- [SemEval-2017 Task 1: Semantic Textual Similarity - Multilingual and Cross-lingual Focused Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00055/) (2017)
- [Universal Sentence Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11175/) (2018)
- [Supervised Learning of Universal Sentence Representations from Natural Language Inference Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02364/) (2017)
- [Skip-Thought Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06726/) (2015)
- [SentEval: An Evaluation Toolkit for Universal Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05449/) (2018)
- [ConSERT: A Contrastive Framework for Self-Supervised Sentence Representation Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11741/) (2021)
- [An efficient framework for learning sentence representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02893/) (2018)
- [Augmented SBERT: Data Augmentation Method for Improving Bi-Encoders for Pairwise Sentence Scoring Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08240/) (2020)
- [DiffCSE: Difference-based Contrastive Learning for Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10298/) (2022)
- [Self-Guided Contrastive Learning for BERT Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07345/) (2021)
- [Learning Distributed Representations of Sentences from Unlabelled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.03483/) (2016)
- [Fast, Effective, and Self-Supervised: Transforming Masked Language Models into Universal Lexical and Sentence Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08027/) (2021)
- [PromptBERT: Improving BERT Sentence Embeddings with Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04337/) (2022)
- [ESimCSE: Enhanced Sample Building Method for Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04380/) (2021)
- [Debiased Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00656/) (2022)
- [SNCSE: Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Sentence Embedding with Soft Negative Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05979/) (2022)
- [Trans-Encoder: Unsupervised sentence-pair modelling through self- and mutual-distillations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13059/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Text Classification via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08377/) (2023)
- [RouterDC: Query-Based Router by Dual Contrastive Learning for Assembling Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19886/) (2024)
- [Pushing the Limits of ChatGPT on NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09719/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Sentence Representations: From the BERT Epoch to the ChatGPT Era and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12641/) (2023)
- [CoT-BERT: Enhancing Unsupervised Sentence Representation through Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11143/) (2023)
- [Revealing the Blind Spot of Sentence Encoder Evaluation by HEROS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05083/) (2023)
- [AAdaM at SemEval-2024 Task 1: Augmentation and Adaptation for Multilingual Semantic Textual Relatedness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01490/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Sentence Representation Learning with Frequency-induced Adversarial Tuning and Incomplete Sentence Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08655/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models can Contrastively Refine their Generation for Better Sentence Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10962/) (2023)
- [On The Role of Pretrained Language Models in General-Purpose Text Embeddings: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20783/) (2025)
- [Refining Sentence Embedding Model through Ranking Sentences Generation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13656/) (2025)
- [OASIS: Order-Augmented Strategy for Improved Code Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08161/) (2025)
- [DALR: Dual-level Alignment Learning for Multimodal Sentence Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21096/) (2025)
- [Generate to Understand for Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10056/) (2023)
- [DefSent+: Improving sentence embeddings of language models by projecting definition sentences into a quasi-isotropic or isotropic vector space of unlimited dictionary entries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16153/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised sentence representation learning has progressed through contrastive learning and data augmentation methods such as dropout masking. Despite this progress, sentence encoders are still limited to using only an input sentence when predicting its semantic vector. In this work, we show that the semantic meaning of a sentence is also determined by nearest-neighbor sentences that are similar to the input sentence. Based on this finding, we propose a novel unsupervised sentence encoder, RankEncoder. RankEncoder predicts the semantic vector of an input sentence by leveraging its relationship with other sentences in an external corpus, as well as the input sentence itself. We evaluate RankEncoder on semantic textual benchmark datasets. From the experimental results, we verify that 1) RankEncoder achieves 80.07% Spearman's correlation, a 1.1% absolute improvement compared to the previous state-of-the-art performance, 2) RankEncoder is universally applicable to existing unsupervised sentence embedding methods, and 3) RankEncoder is specifically effective for predicting the similarity scores of similar sentence pairs.