LET: Linguistic Knowledge Enhanced Graph Transformer for Chinese Short Text Matching

Abstract: Chinese short text matching is a fundamental task in natural language processing. Existing approaches usually take Chinese characters or words as input tokens. They have two limitations: 1) Some Chinese words are polysemous, and semantic information is not fully utilized. 2) Some models suffer potential issues caused by word segmentation. Here we introduce HowNet as an external knowledge base and propose a Linguistic knowledge Enhanced graph Transformer (LET) to deal with word ambiguity. Additionally, we adopt the word lattice graph as input to maintain multi-granularity information. Our model is also complementary to pre-trained LLMs. Experimental results on two Chinese datasets show that our models outperform various typical text matching approaches. Ablation study also indicates that both semantic information and multi-granularity information are important for text matching modeling.