Text embeddings are numerical representations of texts that capture semantic and syntactic information, enabling computers to understand and process human language more effectively1. They are crucial in natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as text retrieval, matching, and generating word predictions and similarities.
MTEB covers 112 languages and 58 datasets.
Dense text embeddings solve the lexical mismatch problem by transforming the relevance matching task into nearest neighbor search in a semantic space1. This approach tackles vocabulary and semantic mismatches by capturing the semantic meaning of words and their relationships, allowing for more effective text retrieval and matching compared to traditional lexical matching approaches like BM25.