ASOBEK at SemEval-2016 Task 1: Sentence representation with character N-gram embeddings for semantic textual similarity

A growing body of research has recently been conducted on semantic textual similarity using a variety of neural network models. While re- cent research focuses on word-based represen- tation for phrases, sentences and even paragraphs, this study considers an alternative approach based on character n-grams. We generate embeddings for character n-grams using a continuous-bag-of-n-grams neural network model. Three different sentence rep- resentations based on n-gram embeddings are considered. Results are reported for experi- ments with bigram, trigram and 4-gram em- beddings on the STS Core dataset for SemEval-2016 Task 1.