A Comprehensive Survey of Sentence Representations: From the BERT Epoch to the ChatGPT Era and Beyond
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Abstract (arXiv)
Sentence representations are a critical component in NLP applications such as retrieval, question answering, and text classification. They capture the meaning of a sentence, enabling machines to understand and reason over human language. In recent years, significant progress has been made in developing methods for learning sentence representations, including unsupervised, supervised, and transfer learning approaches. However there is no literature review on sentence representations till now. In this paper, we provide an overview of the different methods for sentence representation learning, focusing mostly on deep learning models. We provide a systematic organization of the literature, highlighting the key contributions and challenges in this area. Overall, our review highlights the importance of this area in natural language processing, the progress made in sentence representation learning, and the challenges that remain. We conclude with directions for future research, suggesting potential avenues for improving the quality and efficiency of sentence representations.
Key facts. Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 66 of its 82 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 May 2023.
Builds on
66 of 82 references.
References · 66
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38 more
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50 most cited of 66 All 66 (JSON)
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Citing papers per year: 2023: 1; 2024: 3; 2025: 4; 2026: 4.
12 papers.
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- 2025ScaleDoc: Scaling LLM-based Predicates over Large Document Collectionscited by 3
- 2025A Retrieval-Based Approach to Medical Procedure Matching in Romaniancited by 2
- 2025Dense Retrievers Can Fail on Simple Queries: Revealing The Granularity Dilemma of Embeddingscited by 2
- 2023Translation Aligned Sentence Embeddings for Turkish Languagecited by 0
- 2024DefSent+: Improving sentence embeddings of language models by projecting definition sentences into a quasi-isotropic or isotropic vector space of unlimited dictionary entriescited by 0
- 2025Collaborative Intelligence: Topic Modelling of Large Language Model use in Live Cybersecurity Operationscited by 0
- 2026TALAS: Teacher-Anchored Layer Alignment with Adaptive Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Embedding Distillationcited by 0
- 2026From transcription to semantic corpus analysis: unsupervised learning of sentence representations for ancient languagescited by 0
- 2026Know Yourself and Know Your Neighbour: A Syntactically Informed Self-Supervised Compositional Sentence Representation Learning Framework using a Recursive Hypernetworkcited by 0
- 2026Know Yourself and Know Your Neighbour: A Syntactically Informed Self-Supervised Compositional Sentence Representation Learning Framework using a Recursive Hypernetwork12 Oct 2026
- 2026From transcription to semantic corpus analysis: unsupervised learning of sentence representations for ancient languages27 Jul 2026
- 2026TALAS: Teacher-Anchored Layer Alignment with Adaptive Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Embedding Distillation20 Jun 2026
- 2026Reasoning-Driven Synthetic Data Generation and Evaluation31 Mar 2026
- 2025ScaleDoc: Scaling LLM-based Predicates over Large Document Collections16 Sep 2025
- 2025Collaborative Intelligence: Topic Modelling of Large Language Model use in Live Cybersecurity Operations25 Aug 2025
- 2025Dense Retrievers Can Fail on Simple Queries: Revealing The Granularity Dilemma of Embeddings10 Jun 2025
- 2025A Retrieval-Based Approach to Medical Procedure Matching in Romanian26 Mar 2025
- 2024An Empirical Study on Capability of Large Language Models in Understanding Code Semantics4 Jul 2024
- 2024Recent advances in text embedding: A Comprehensive Review of Top-Performing Methods on the MTEB Benchmark27 May 2024
- 2024DefSent+: Improving sentence embeddings of language models by projecting definition sentences into a quasi-isotropic or isotropic vector space of unlimited dictionary entries25 May 2024
- 2023Translation Aligned Sentence Embeddings for Turkish Language16 Nov 2023