Chinese sentence matching with multiple alignments and feature augmentation

Chinese sentence matching is a critical and yet challenging task in natural language processing. Recent work on modeling sentence semantic relations with deep neural models has shown its great potential in improving the performance of sentence matching. However, existing sentence matching methods usually focus on generating word-level sentence representation, which neglects the character-level information and leads to weak semantic representations. Also, they usually capture the interactive features with an attention-based alignment, which are typically implemented on sentence level and neglect the interactions among characters, words and sentences. This paper proposes a novel Chinese sentence matching model with Multiple Alignments and Feature Augmentation (MAFA). Specifically, the model first employs the multi-level embedding layer to accept the character and word sequences of sentences, and introduces the multiple alignment layer to capture the interactions among characters, words and sentences in turn. Then, the feature augmentation layer is applied to combine the interactive features to generate the final semantic matching representations. Finally, the prediction layer is utilized to judge the matching degree of the input sentences. Substantial and extensive experiments are conducted on two real-world data sets to show that MAFA significantly outperforms the competing methods and achieve comnarable nerformance with BERT-based methods.