# NLU-STR at SemEval-2024 Task 1: Generative-based Augmentation and Encoder-based Scoring for Semantic Textual Relatedness

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00659 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00659/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [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)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [Language-agnostic BERT Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01852/) (2020)
- [AraBERT: Transformer-based Model for Arabic Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00104/) (2020)
- [Learning Word Vectors for 157 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06893/) (2018)
- [ARBERT & MARBERT: Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01785/) (2020)
- [Best-Worst Scaling More Reliable than Rating Scales: A Case Study on Sentiment Intensity Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01765/) (2017)
- [A Panoramic Survey of Natural Language Processing in the Arab World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12631/) (2020)
- [Wojood: Nested Arabic Named Entity Corpus and Recognition using BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09651/) (2022)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Word Representation Models: From Classical to State-Of-The-Art Word Representation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15036/) (2020)
- [Curras + Baladi: Towards a Levantine Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09692/) (2022)
- [The Arabic Ontology -- An Arabic Wordnet with Ontologically Clean Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09664/) (2022)
- [ArabGlossBERT: Fine-Tuning BERT on Context-Gloss Pairs for WSD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09685/) (2022)
- [SemRel2024: A Collection of Semantic Textual Relatedness Datasets for 13 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08638/) (2024)
- [Nabra: Syrian Arabic Dialects with Morphological Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17315/) (2023)
- [A Benchmark and Scoring Algorithm for Enriching Arabic Synonyms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02232/) (2023)
- [SALMA: Arabic Sense-Annotated Corpus and WSD Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19029/) (2023)
- [LU-BZU at SemEval-2021 Task 2: Word2Vec and Lemma2Vec performance in Arabic Word-in-Context disambiguation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08110/) (2021)
- [ArBanking77: Intent Detection Neural Model and a New Dataset in Modern and Dialectical Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19034/) (2023)
- [Arabic Fine-Grained Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17333/) (2023)
- [Context-Gloss Augmentation for Improving Arabic Target Sense Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03126/) (2023)
- [Text Relatedness Based on a Word Thesaurus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1401.5699/) (2014)
- [Context-gloss Augmentation for Improving Word Sense Disambiguation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07174/) (2021)
- [Semantic Relatedness Based Re-ranker for Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07950/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [AraFinNLP 2024: The First Arabic Financial NLP Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09818/) (2024)
- [SinaTools: Open Source Toolkit for Arabic Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01523/) (2024)
- [The Rise of AfricaNLP: A Survey of Contributions, Contributors, Community Impact, and Bibliometric Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25477/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Semantic textual relatedness is a broader concept of semantic similarity. It measures the extent to which two chunks of text convey similar meaning or topics, or share related concepts or contexts. This notion of relatedness can be applied in various applications, such as document clustering and summarizing. SemRel-2024, a shared task in SemEval-2024, aims at reducing the gap in the semantic relatedness task by providing datasets for fourteen languages and dialects including Arabic. This paper reports on our participation in Track A (Algerian and Moroccan dialects) and Track B (Modern Standard Arabic). A BERT-based model is augmented and fine-tuned for regression scoring in supervised track (A), while BERT-based cosine similarity is employed for unsupervised track (B). Our system ranked 1st in SemRel-2024 for MSA with a Spearman correlation score of 0.49. We ranked 5th for Moroccan and 12th for Algerian with scores of 0.83 and 0.53, respectively.