All we ever seem to talk about nowadays are BERT this, BERT that. I want to talk about something else, but BERT is just too good - so this video will be about BERT for sentence similarity.

A big part of NLP relies on similarity in highly-dimensional spaces. Typically an NLP solution will take some text, process it to create a big vector/array representing said text - then perform several transformations.

It's highly-dimensional magic.

Sentence similarity is one of the clearest examples of how powerful highly-dimensional magic can be.

The logic is this:

• Take a sentence, convert it into a vector.
• Take many other sentences, and convert them into vectors.
• Find sentences that have the smallest distance (Euclidean) or smallest angle (cosine similarity) between them - more on that here.
• We now have a measure of semantic similarity between sentences - easy!

At a high level, there's not much else to it. But of course, we want to understand what is happening in a little more detail and implement this in Python too.

Medium article

Easy mode