SCTAR: A Multi-Layer BiLSTM-Based Chinese Short Text Similarity Computation Model with Attention Mechanism

Text semantic similarity is a crucial research area in Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, traditional methods for calculating the similarity of short Chinese texts often fall short in accuracy and other crucial aspects. The Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Network (BiLSTM) has demonstrated remarkable performance in computing the similarity of short Chinese texts by effectively capturing long-range dependencies and semantic information. Additionally, the multi-head attention mechanism considers the interaction between different text locations and semantic information, enhancing the model’s representative capacity. Building upon this foundation, our paper proposes an enhanced model known as SCTbilstmAttRdrop (SCTAR). This model is constructed based on a multilayer BiLSTM architecture and incorporates an SE-gated convolutional module and a convolutional multi-head attention-aware model. We conducted extensive evaluations using two Chinese short text datasets, Chinese-SNLI and CCKS2018_Task3. The experimental results unequivocally demonstrate that our SCTAR model surpasses other common methods in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 scores when tasked with computing the similarity of Chinese short texts.