Which of two sentences is closer? — Finding similar things
Being close doesn't mean sharing words. When meanings overlap, they land close together.
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1 · Think first
Yesterday we turned words into bundles of numbers. Sentences can be turned into them the same way, and then you can measure the distance between two sentences.
Being close doesn't mean sharing words. Even with not a single word in common, sentences that mean the same thing land close together.
On the flip side, if the words are almost the same but the meaning is opposite, they end up far apart. Like 'fun' and 'not fun.'
2 · Experiment · Pick one
Try it — Which one is closer to the base sentence?
Each base sentence comes with two candidates. Pick the one that's closer. You'll get scored right away, along with why.
Don't look at whether the words overlap — look at whether the meanings do.
Figure
Measuring how close they are
The longer the bar, the closer together the two sentences sit.
3 · Quiz
Quick check
Three questions. Pick an answer and it's marked right away, with the reason why.
Today in one line
Today in one line
Being close doesn't mean sharing words.
When meanings overlap, they land close together.
Learn more
- A 2019 paper that turns whole sentences into number bundles so similar sentences can be found fast. — Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks (2019)
- A 2020 paper showing a kind of search that finds the passage with the answer even when the words don't overlap. — Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering (2020)