Rule-based vs. Neural Net Approaches to Semantic Textual Similarity

AbstractThis paper presents a neural net approach to determine Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) using attention-based bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Networks (Bi-LSTM). To this date, most of the traditional STS systems were rule-based that built on top of excessive use of linguistic features and resources. In this paper, we present an end-to-end attention-based Bi-LSTM neural network system that solely takes word-level features, without expensive feature engineering work or the usage of external resources. By comparing its performance with traditional rule-based systems against SemEval-2012 benchmark, we make an assessment on the limitations and strengths of neural net systems to rule-based systems on Semantic Textual Similarity.