The Critical Role of Aspects in Measuring Document Similarity

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Hossain, Eftekhar, Hazra, Tarnika, Bhuiyan, Ahatesham, Karmaker, Santu
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Hossain, Eftekhar
Hazra, Tarnika
Bhuiyan, Ahatesham
Karmaker, Santu
author_facet Hossain, Eftekhar
Hazra, Tarnika
Bhuiyan, Ahatesham
Karmaker, Santu
contents We introduce ASPECTSIM, a simple and interpretable framework that requires conditioning document similarity on an explicitly specified aspect, which is different from the traditional holistic approach in measuring document similarity. Experimenting with a newly constructed benchmark of 26K aspect-document pairs, we found that ASPECTSIM, when implemented with direct GPT-4o prompting, achieves substantially higher human-machine agreement ($\approx$80% higher) than the same for holistic similarity without explicit aspects. These findings underscore the importance of explicitly accounting for aspects when measuring document similarity and highlight the need to revise standard practice. Next, we conducted a large-scale meta-evaluation using 16 smaller open-source LLMs and 9 embedding models with a focus on making ASPECTSIM accessible and reproducible. While directly prompting LLMs to produce ASPECTSIM scores turned out be ineffective (20-30% human-machine agreement), a simple two-stage refinement improved their agreement by $\approx$140%. Nevertheless, agreement remains well below that of GPT-4o-based models, indicating that smaller open-source LLMs still lag behind large proprietary models in capturing aspect-conditioned similarity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_03435
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Critical Role of Aspects in Measuring Document Similarity
Hossain, Eftekhar
Hazra, Tarnika
Bhuiyan, Ahatesham
Karmaker, Santu
Computation and Language
We introduce ASPECTSIM, a simple and interpretable framework that requires conditioning document similarity on an explicitly specified aspect, which is different from the traditional holistic approach in measuring document similarity. Experimenting with a newly constructed benchmark of 26K aspect-document pairs, we found that ASPECTSIM, when implemented with direct GPT-4o prompting, achieves substantially higher human-machine agreement ($\approx$80% higher) than the same for holistic similarity without explicit aspects. These findings underscore the importance of explicitly accounting for aspects when measuring document similarity and highlight the need to revise standard practice. Next, we conducted a large-scale meta-evaluation using 16 smaller open-source LLMs and 9 embedding models with a focus on making ASPECTSIM accessible and reproducible. While directly prompting LLMs to produce ASPECTSIM scores turned out be ineffective (20-30% human-machine agreement), a simple two-stage refinement improved their agreement by $\approx$140%. Nevertheless, agreement remains well below that of GPT-4o-based models, indicating that smaller open-source LLMs still lag behind large proprietary models in capturing aspect-conditioned similarity.
title The Critical Role of Aspects in Measuring Document Similarity
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.03435