Multi-Task Contrastive Learning for 8192-Token Bilingual Text Embeddings

We introduce a novel suite of state-of-the-art bilingual text embedding models that are designed to support English and another target language. These models are capable of processing lengthy text inputs with up to 8192 tokens, making them highly versatile for a range of natural language processing tasks such as text retrieval, clustering, and semantic textual similarity (STS) calculations. By focusing on bilingual models and introducing a unique multi-task learning objective, we have significantly improved the model performance on STS tasks, which outperforms the capabilities of existing multilingual models in both target language understanding and cross-lingual evaluation tasks. Moreover, our bilingual models are more efficient, requiring fewer parameters and less memory due to their smaller vocabulary needs. Furthermore, we have expanded the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) to include benchmarks for German and Spanish embedding models. This integration aims to stimulate further research and advancement in text embedding technologies for these languages.

Jina Embeddings 2: 8192-Token General-Purpose Text Embeddings for Long Documents

Text embedding models have emerged as powerful tools for transforming sentences into fixed-sized feature vectors that encapsulate semantic information. While these models are essential for tasks like information retrieval, semantic clustering, and text re-ranking, most existing open-source models, especially those built on architectures like BERT, struggle to represent lengthy documents and often resort to truncation. One common approach to mitigate this challenge involves splitting documents into smaller paragraphs for embedding. However, this strategy results in a much larger set of vectors, consequently leading to increased memory consumption and computationally intensive vector searches with elevated latency. To address these challenges, we introduce Jina Embeddings 2, an open-source text embedding model capable of accommodating up to 8192 tokens. This model is designed to transcend the conventional 512-token limit and adeptly process long documents. Jina Embeddings 2 not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on a range of embedding-related tasks in the MTEB benchmark but also matches the performance of OpenAI's proprietary ada-002 model. Additionally, our experiments indicate that an extended context can enhance performance in tasks such as NarrativeQA.

Jina Embeddings: A Novel Set of High-Performance Sentence Embedding Models

Jina Embeddings constitutes a set of high-performance sentence embedding models adept at translating various textual inputs into numerical representations, thereby capturing the semantic essence of the text. The models excel in applications such as dense retrieval and semantic textual similarity. This paper details the development of Jina Embeddings, starting with the creation of high-quality pairwise and triplet datasets. It underlines the crucial role of data cleaning in dataset preparation, gives in-depth insights into the model training process, and concludes with a comprehensive performance evaluation using the Massive Textual Embedding Benchmark (MTEB). To increase the model's awareness of negations, we constructed a novel training and evaluation dataset of negated and non-negated statements, which we make publicly available to the community.

Microphone Utility Estimation in Acoustic Sensor Networks using Single-Channel Signal Features

In multichannel signal processing with distributed sensors, choosing the optimal subset of observed sensor signals to be exploited is crucial in order to maximize algorithmic performance and reduce computational load, ideally both at the same time. In the acoustic domain, signal cross-correlation is a natural choice to quantify the usefulness of microphone signals, i. e., microphone utility, for array processing, but its estimation requires that the uncoded signals are synchronized and transmitted between nodes. In resource-constrained environments like acoustic sensor networks, low data transmission rates often make transmission of all observed signals to the centralized location infeasible, thus discouraging direct estimation of signal cross-correlation. Instead, we employ characteristic features of the recorded signals to estimate the usefulness of individual microphone signals. In this contribution, we provide a comprehensive analysis of model-based microphone utility estimation approaches that use signal features and, as an alternative, also propose machine learning-based estimation methods that identify optimal sensor signal utility features. The performance of both approaches is validated experimentally using both simulated and recorded acoustic data, comprising a variety of realistic and practically relevant acoustic scenarios including moving and static sources.

RETRO: Relation Retrofitting For In-Database Machine Learning on Textual Data

There are massive amounts of textual data residing in databases, valuable for many machine learning (ML) tasks. Since ML techniques depend on numerical input representations, word embeddings are increasingly utilized to convert symbolic representations such as text into meaningful numbers. However, a naive one-to-one mapping of each word in a database to a word embedding vector is not sufficient and would lead to poor accuracies in ML tasks. Thus, we argue to additionally incorporate the information given by the database schema into the embedding, e.g. which words appear in the same column or are related to each other. In this paper, we propose RETRO (RElational reTROfitting), a novel approach to learn numerical representations of text values in databases, capturing the best of both worlds, the rich information encoded by word embeddings and the relational information encoded by database tables. We formulate relation retrofitting as a learning problem and present an efficient algorithm solving it. We investigate the impact of various hyperparameters on the learning problem and derive good settings for all of them. Our evaluation shows that the proposed embeddings are ready-to-use for many ML tasks such as classification and regression and even outperform state-of-the-art techniques in integration tasks such as null value imputation and link prediction.