This is a sentence-transformers model: It maps sentences & paragraphs to a 768 dimensional dense vector space and was designed for semantic search. It has been trained on 500k (query, answer) pairs from the MS MARCO Passages dataset. For an introduction to semantic search, have a look at: SBERT.net - Semantic Search

Usage (Sentence-Transformers)

Using this model becomes easy when you have sentence-transformers installed:

pip install -U sentence-transformers

Then you can use the model like this:

python

from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer, util

query = "How many people live in London?"
docs = ["Around 9 Million people live in London", "London is known for its financial district"]

#Load the model
model = SentenceTransformer('sentence-transformers/msmarco-MiniLM-L12-cos-v5')

#Encode query and documents
query_emb = model.encode(query)
doc_emb = model.encode(docs)

#Compute dot score between query and all document embeddings
scores = util.dot_score(query_emb, doc_emb)[0].cpu().tolist()

#Combine docs & scores
doc_score_pairs = list(zip(docs, scores))

#Sort by decreasing score
doc_score_pairs = sorted(doc_score_pairs, key=lambda x: x[1], reverse=True)

#Output passages & scores
for doc, score in doc_score_pairs:
    print(score, doc)

Usage (HuggingFace Transformers)

Without sentence-transformers, you can use the model like this: First, you pass your input through the transformer model, then you have to apply the correct pooling-operation on-top of the contextualized word embeddings.

python

from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModel
import torch
import torch.nn.functional as F

#Mean Pooling - Take average of all tokens
def mean_pooling(model_output, attention_mask):
    token_embeddings = model_output.last_hidden_state #First element of model_output contains all token embeddings
    input_mask_expanded = attention_mask.unsqueeze(-1).expand(token_embeddings.size()).float()
    return torch.sum(token_embeddings * input_mask_expanded, 1) / torch.clamp(input_mask_expanded.sum(1), min=1e-9)


#Encode text
def encode(texts):
    # Tokenize sentences
    encoded_input = tokenizer(texts, padding=True, truncation=True, return_tensors='pt')

    # Compute token embeddings
    with torch.no_grad():
        model_output = model(**encoded_input, return_dict=True)

    # Perform pooling
    embeddings = mean_pooling(model_output, encoded_input['attention_mask'])

    # Normalize embeddings
    embeddings = F.normalize(embeddings, p=2, dim=1)
	
    return embeddings


# Sentences we want sentence embeddings for
query = "How many people live in London?"
docs = ["Around 9 Million people live in London", "London is known for its financial district"]

# Load model from HuggingFace Hub
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("sentence-transformers/msmarco-MiniLM-L12-cos-v5")
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained("sentence-transformers/msmarco-MiniLM-L12-cos-v5")

#Encode query and docs
query_emb = encode(query)
doc_emb = encode(docs)

#Compute dot score between query and all document embeddings
scores = torch.mm(query_emb, doc_emb.transpose(0, 1))[0].cpu().tolist()

#Combine docs & scores
doc_score_pairs = list(zip(docs, scores))

#Sort by decreasing score
doc_score_pairs = sorted(doc_score_pairs, key=lambda x: x[1], reverse=True)

#Output passages & scores
for doc, score in doc_score_pairs:
    print(score, doc)

Technical Details

In the following some technical details how this model must be used:

Setting	Value
Dimensions	768
Produces normalized embeddings	Yes
Pooling-Method	Mean pooling
Suitable score functions	dot-product (`util.dot_score`), cosine-similarity (`util.cos_sim`), or euclidean distance

Note: When loaded with sentence-transformers, this model produces normalized embeddings with length 1. In that case, dot-product and cosine-similarity are equivalent. dot-product is preferred as it is faster. Euclidean distance is proportional to dot-product and can also be used.

Citing & Authors

This model was trained by sentence-transformers.

If you find this model helpful, feel free to cite our publication Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks:

bibtex

@inproceedings{reimers-2019-sentence-bert,
    title = "Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks",
    author = "Reimers, Nils and Gurevych, Iryna",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = "11",
    year = "2019",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "http://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10084",
}