Evaluation of BERT-like models for small scale ad-hoc information retrieval

Sammanfattning: Measuring semantic similarity between two sentences is an ongoing research field with big leaps being taken every year. This thesis looks at using modern methods of semantic similarity measurement for an ad-hoc information retrieval (IR) system. The main challenge tackled was answering the question "What happens when you don’t have situation-specific data?". Using encoder-based transformer architectures pioneered by Devlin et al., which excel at fine-tuning to situationally specific domains, this thesis shows just how well the presented methodology can work and makes recommendations for future attempts at similar domain-specific tasks. It also shows an example of how a web application can be created to make use of these fast-learning architectures.