Semantic Textual Similarity

Also known as STS

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Overview

Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) studies how much meaning two pieces of text share, supporting tasks such as paraphrase detection, semantic search, and evaluating generated text. Common approaches compare sentence embeddings with cosine or rank-based metrics, fine-tune encoders with contrastive or similarity-regression objectives, or use natural language inference models and large language models to judge pairs. Evaluation uses human-rated similarity sets alongside paraphrase, retrieval, multilingual, and domain-specific benchmarks. A central challenge is that high similarity can hide important distinctions such as contradictions or changes in legal force, while scores also vary with model geometry, context, language, and domain.

Latest papers

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44 papers4 papers in the last four weeks, down 33% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. Policy Central: Detecting Conflicts, Redundancy, and Similarity in Deployed Police Policy

    Oct 21, 2026Holly Baker, Michael Kuo, Kyana PollasPolicy EvaluationSemantic Textual Similarity

    PolicingLab, Miami, Florida, United States

  2. Auditing Semantic and Relational Reliability in Open-Vocabulary Human-Object Interaction Evaluation

    Oct 19, 2026S M Asif Hossain, Ruksat Khan Shayoni, Md Kishor MorolHuman-Object InteractionSemantic Textual Similarity

  3. Auditing Pairwise Equivalence Judgments: Self-Critique Effects and Diversity Measurement in Multi-Agent Hypothesis Generation

    Oct 2, 2026Ji Young Byun, Anthony Hu, Jesse Rogers +3Language Model Generation EvaluationMulti-Agent LLMs

    Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD 21218, USA · Merck & Co., Inc. West Point, PA 19486, USA

  4. Word Similarity Datasets for Indian Languages: Annotation and Baseline Systems

    Sep 28, 2026Syed S. Akhtar, Arihant Gupta, Avijit Vajpayee +2Semantic Textual SimilarityLow-Resource Language Processing

    International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad, Telangana, India

  5. High-Level Text Preprocessing for Semantic Similarity Analysis of Discursive Texts: A Framework and Empirical Demonstration

    Sep 27, 2026Mehmet Murat Albayrakoglu, Mehmet Nafiz AydinSemantic Textual Similarity

    Işık University Faculty of Economics, Administrative and Social Sciences Department of Management Information Systems Istanbul, Türkiye · Boğaziçi University Faculty of Managerial Sciences, Department of Management Information Systems Istanbul, Türkiye

  6. R-DEIM Net: An Efficient Rationale-Augmented Dual-Expert Interaction Model for Paraphrase Detection

    Sep 24, 2026Pushp Garg, Vaibhav Prajapati, Himangshu SarmaSemantic Textual Similarity

    Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Sri City, India · University of Technology Nuremberg (UTN), Germany

  7. Rethinking Human-Aligned Evaluation: An Analysis of Semantic Metrics Beyond WER

    Sep 18, 2026Hritika Sharma, Thibault Bañeras-Roux, Alessandra Pinto +4ASR EvaluationSemantic Textual Similarity

    Faculty of Computer Science and Technology, Algoma University · Idiap Research Institute · School of Psychology, Algoma University +1

  8. Parameter-Efficient Quantum NLP for Paraphrase Detection: Performance, Robustness, and Entanglement

    Sep 13, 2026Farha Nausheen, Khandakar Ahmed, Farina RiazQuantum NLPQuantum Machine Learning

    ISILC, Victoria University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia · CSIRO, Australian International Institute of Higher Education, Sydney, NSW, Australia

  9. LexFlip: A Dissociation Diagnostic for Legal Meaning Preservation Metrics

    Sep 4, 2026Gaurab BaralLegal NLPSemantic Textual Similarity

    University of Cincinnati

  10. Vectorizing Classical Tamil: Representation Learning for Verse-Commentary Pairs

    Sep 4, 2026Amrit Gopinath, Sangeetha SivanesanSemantic Textual SimilarityRepresentation Learning

    Sri Sivasubramaniya Nadar College of Engineering, Chennai, India · National Institute of Technology Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, India

  11. Topic Matching in the Wild: Benchmark and Lessons from Real-World ASR Transcripts

    Aug 27, 2026Saman Rahbar, Xiliang Zhu, Irvin Cardoza +1Semantic Textual Similarity

    Dialpad Inc.

  12. ITL: Interpretable Document Alignment with Structured Reference Frameworks

    Aug 27, 2026Raúl Giráldez, Dayrelis Mena, Jesús S. Aguilar--RuizSemantic AlignmentConcept Alignment

    School of Engineering Pablo de Olavide University ES-41013 Seville, Spain

  13. A Dual-Dimensional LLM Framework for Automated Item Incidental Content Similarity Analysis in Large-Scale Assessments

    Aug 25, 2026Jing Huang, Jihong Zhang, Hua-Hua ChangComputerized Adaptive TestingEducational Assessment

    College of Education, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA · Educational Statistics & Research Methods, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, USA

  14. Exploring Dowker Homology for Sentence Similarity

    Aug 24, 2026Marius Huber, Juri OpitzSemantic Textual SimilarityTopological Data Analysis

    Department of Computational Linguistics University of Zürich

  15. Convergence in Science, Divergence in Religion: Calibrated Framing Differences Across Wikipedia's Language Editions

    Aug 22, 2026Hung-Hsuan ChenConcept AlignmentCross-Lingual Representation Alignment

    Computer Science and Information Engineering National Central University Taoyuan, Taiwan

  16. Extractive Summarization for Arabic Documents Using SAraBERT with a Semantic Siamese Similarity Evaluation Metric

    Aug 21, 2026Sami Shames El Deen, Mariette AwadArabic Language ModelsText Summarization

    American University of Beirut

  17. Similarity Gates Approve Reversals: A Validity Audit of Embedding-Cosine Thresholds in Agent Systems

    Aug 10, 2026Scott E. FriasSemantic Textual SimilarityText Embedding Evaluation

    Eigenforma · Freemind Labs

  18. Exploring Semantic Stability Across Reviews in the Linux Kernel

    Aug 10, 2026Lucas Ciziks, Paulo Meirelles, Marco Aurélio GerosaSemantic Textual SimilaritySemantic Change Detection

    Universidade de São Paulo (IME-USP) São Paulo, Brazil · Northern Arizona University (NAU) Flagstaff, AZ, USA

  19. Consensus Measures for Unstructured Biomedical Text Annotations

    Aug 4, 2026Pascal Wullschleger, Christian Kreis, Martin A. Walter +2Inter-Rater ReliabilitySemantic Textual Similarity

    Hamilton Institute, Maynooth University, Ireland · University of Lucerne, Switzerland · Lucerne School of Computer Science and IT, Switzerland

  20. From transcription to semantic corpus analysis: unsupervised learning of sentence representations for ancient languages

    Jul 27, 2026Th{é}otime de la SelleSemantic Textual SimilaritySentence Embeddings

    ISC, HiSoMA, CNRS · Institut des Sources Chrétiennes, HiSoMA, CNRS, Lyon, France

  21. Automated Compliance Mapping in Cloud Security with Domain-Adapted Sentence Transformers

    Jul 7, 2026John Bianchi, Luca Petrillo, Fabio Martinelli +1Semantic Textual SimilarityDomain Adaptation

    Institute for Informatics and Telematics (IIT-CNR), Pisa, Italy · IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Lucca, Italy · Institute for High Performance Computing and Networking (ICAR-CNR), Rende (CS), Italy

  22. Semantic Homogenization in Italian Popular Music: A Diachronic Analysis

    Jul 6, 2026Lorenzo Canale, Stefano Scotta, Alberto MessinaSemantic Textual SimilaritySemantic Change Detection

    Centro Ricerche, Innovazione Tecnologica e Sperimentazione, RAI, Via Giovanni Carlo Cavalli 6, Turin, 10138, Italy.

  23. Lacuna Inc. at SemEval-2026 Task 4: Structurally Gated State-Space Models for Disentangling Narrative Similarity

    Jul 3, 2026Aleksey Kudelya, Rafif Alshawi, Alexander ShirninSemantic Textual SimilarityRepresentation Learning

    ïHSE University

  24. Anisotropy Decides Cosine vs. Rank Metrics for Text Embeddings

    Jun 28, 2026V. S. Raghu ParupudiSemantic Textual SimilarityNeural Representation Geometry

    University of California, San Diego

  25. AnySimLite: A Lightweight Few-Shot Similarity Encoder for On-Device Speech-Adjacent Classification

    Jun 24, 2026Sourav Ghosh, Yash Bhatia, Keshav Goyal +3Semantic Textual SimilarityText Classification

    Samsung R&D Institute Bangalore, India · ITBHU

  26. MiqraBERT: Regression-Based Sentence-BERT Finetuning for Biblical Hebrew Parallel Detection

    Jun 17, 2026David M. SmileySemantic CorrespondenceSemantic Textual Similarity

    University of Notre Dame

  27. ttda704 at SemEval-2026 Task 4: Modeling Narrative Structures via Pseudonymization and Multi-View Sentence Alignment

    Jun 14, 2026Tai Tran Tan, An Dinh ThienSemantic Textual SimilarityRepresentation Learning

    University of Information Technology, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam · 2Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

  28. DySem: Uncovering Dynamic Semantic Components of Large Language Models for Calculating Semantic Textual Similarity

    May 28, 2026Kaijie Zheng, Weiqin Wang, Yile Wang +1Semantic Textual Similarity

    College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University

  29. MATCHA: Matching Text via Contrastive Semantic Alignment

    May 26, 2026Siran Li, Ece Sena Etoglu, Carsten Eickhoff +1LLM EvaluationSemantic Textual Similarity

    University of Tübingen

  30. Neural Router: Semantic Content Matching for Agentic AI

    May 25, 2026Lauri Lovén, Abhishek Kumar, Alexander Engelhardt +5Semantic Textual SimilarityLLM Inference Acceleration

    Future Computing Group, University of Oulu, Finland · University of Jyväskylä, Finland · Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Finland +1