Advanced sentence-embedding method considering token importance based on explainable artificial intelligence and text summarization model

Although pretrained language models achieve high performance on various natural language processing tasks, they still require further improvements in the sentence embedding task. Many studies have improved performance in this task using pre-trained language models and contrastive learning, but these approaches are limited because they are based on naive average pooling and CLS tokens. Therefore, we propose an advanced sentence-embedding method based on weighted pooling that considers token importance. Specifically, the token importance is calculated by combining an explainable artificial-intelligence module with a text summarization model, and the final sentence embedding is derived through weighted pooling token embedding and token importance. Thus, we derive a sentence embedding that considers both the local information of the token embedding and the global information of the entire sentence. Experimental results reveal that our proposed sentence embedding outperforms other models on both text similarity tasks and text classification. Moreover, the proposed method’s robustness is verified through the results of an ablation study.