The rapid development of such natural language processing tasks as style transfer, paraphrase, and machine translation often calls for the use of semantic similarity metrics. In recent years a lot of methods to measure the semantic similarity of two short texts were developed. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis for more than a dozen of such methods. Using a new dataset of fourteen thousand sentence pairs human-labeled according to their semantic similarity, we demonstrate that none of the metrics widely used in the literature is close enough to human judgment in these tasks. A number of recently proposed metrics provide comparable results, yet Word Mover Distance is shown to be the most reasonable solution to measure semantic similarity in reformulated texts at the moment.

Alexey Tikhonov, Viacheslav Shibaev, Aleksander Nagaev, Aigul Nugmanova, Ivan P. Yamshchikov. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). 2019.