MBZUAI-UNAM at SemEval-2024 Task 1: Sentence-CROBI, a Simple Cross-Bi-Encoder-Based Neural Network Architecture for Semantic Textual Relatedness

AbstractThe Semantic Textual Relatedness (STR) shared task aims at detecting the degree of semantic relatedness between pairs of sentences on low-resource languages from Afroasiatic, Indoeuropean, Austronesian, Dravidian, and Nigercongo families. We use the Sentence-CROBI architecture to tackle this problem. The model is adapted from its original purpose of paraphrase detection to explore its capacities in a related task with limited resources and in multilingual and monolingual settings. Our approach combines the vector representation of cross-encoders and bi-encoders and possesses high adaptable capacity by combining several pre-trained models. Our system obtained good results on the low-resource languages of the dataset using a multilingual fine-tuning approach.