# Semantic similarity estimation for domain specific data using BERT and other techniques

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18602 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18602/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [A large annotated corpus for learning natural language inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.05326/) (2015)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Recent Trends in Deep Learning Based Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02709/) (2017)
- [Efficient Natural Language Response Suggestion for Smart Reply](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00652/) (2017)
- [Evaluation of sentence embeddings in downstream and linguistic probing tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.06259/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Estimation of semantic similarity is an important research problem both in natural language processing and the natural language understanding, and that has tremendous application on various downstream tasks such as question answering, semantic search, information retrieval, document clustering, word-sense disambiguation and machine translation. In this work, we carry out the estimation of semantic similarity using different state-of-the-art techniques including the USE (Universal Sentence Encoder), InferSent and the most recent BERT, or Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, models. We use two question pairs datasets for the analysis, one is a domain specific in-house dataset and the other is a public dataset which is the Quora's question pairs dataset. We observe that the BERT model gave much superior performance as compared to the other methods. This should be because of the fine-tuning procedure that is involved in its training process, allowing it to learn patterns based on the training data that is used. This works demonstrates the applicability of BERT on domain specific datasets. We infer from the analysis that BERT is the best technique to use in the case of domain specific data.