Enhanced Text Matching Based on Semantic Transformation

Abstract

Text matching is the core of natural language processing (NLP) system. It's considered as a touchstone of the NLP, and it aims to find whether text pairs are equal in semantics. However, the semantic gap in text matching is still an open problem to solve. Inspired by successes of cycle-consistent adversarial network (CycleGAN) in image domain transformation, we propose an enhanced text matching method based on the CycleGAN combined with the Transformer network. Based on the proposed method, the text semantics in a source domain is transferred to a similar or different target domain, and the semantic distance between text pairs is decreased. Meanwhile, we demonstrate our method in paraphrase identification and question answer matching. The matching degree is computed by a standard text matching model to evaluate the transforming influence on narrowing the text semantic gap. The experiments show that our method achieves text domain adaptation, and the effects on different matching models are remarkable. INDEX TERMS Cycle-consistent adversarial network, domain adaptation, semantic transformation, text matching, transformer network.