OssCSE: Overcoming Surface Structure Bias in Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Sentence Embedding

Contrastive learning has been demonstrated effective in unsupervised sentence representation learning. Given one sentence, positive pairs are obtained by passing the sentence to the encoder twice using the different dropout masks, and negative pairs are obtained by taking another sentence in the same mini-batch. However, the method suffers from the surface structure bias, i.e., sentences with similar surface structures will be regarded as close in semantics while sentences with dissimilar surface structures will be viewed as distinct in semantics. This leads to the result that paraphrasing a sentence that is dissimilar in surface structure will receive a lower semantic similarity score than inserting a negative word into the sentence. In this paper, we first verify the bias by collecting a sentence transformation testset. Then we systematically probe the existing models by proposing novel splits based on benchmark datasets in accordance with semantic and surface structure similarity. We tackle the bias in two aspects: balancing the learning target by augmenting with data that counters the bias, and meanwhile preserving word semantics by leveraging recall loss to prevent catastrophic forgetting. We evaluate our model on standard semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks using different pre-trained backbones and achieve state-of-the-art averaged performance across the STS benchmarks. Particularly, our models that are fine-tuned with RoBERTa base and RoBERTa large achieve significantly better performance on most benchmark datasets.