---
tags:
- sentence-transformers
- sentence-similarity
- feature-extraction
- generated_from_trainer
- dataset_size:13284
- loss:MultipleNegativesRankingLoss
- domain:agri-food
- task:ontology-alignment
base_model: sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2
language:
- en
license: apache-2.0
pipeline_tag: sentence-similarity
library_name: sentence-transformers
metrics:
- cosine_accuracy@1
- cosine_accuracy@3
- cosine_mrr@10
- cosine_ndcg@10
model-index:
- name: Ows2-MiniLM
  results:
  - task:
      type: information-retrieval
      name: Information Retrieval
    dataset:
      name: Validation set (InformationRetrievalEvaluator — 2238 queries, ~14 400 corpus terms)
      type: val_evaluator
    metrics:
    - type: cosine_accuracy@1
      value: 0.3968
      name: Cosine Accuracy@1
    - type: cosine_accuracy@3
      value: 0.5366
      name: Cosine Accuracy@3
    - type: cosine_accuracy@5
      value: 0.5920
      name: Cosine Accuracy@5
    - type: cosine_ndcg@10
      value: 0.5185
      name: Cosine NDCG@10
    - type: cosine_mrr@10
      value: 0.4808
      name: Cosine MRR@10
  - task:
      type: information-retrieval
      name: Goldtest — Standard IR (goldtest_evaluator — 100 expert queries, ~14 600 corpus terms)
    dataset:
      name: OWS2 Goldtest
      type: goldtest
    metrics:
    - type: cosine_accuracy@1
      value: 0.55
      name: Cosine Accuracy@1
    - type: cosine_accuracy@3
      value: 0.75
      name: Cosine Accuracy@3
    - type: cosine_mrr@10
      value: 0.6663
      name: Cosine MRR@10
  - task:
      type: information-retrieval
      name: Goldtest — Exact/Taboo Benchmark (CombinedGoldtestEvaluator — 100 expert queries, 14 544 unique terms)
    dataset:
      name: OWS2 Goldtest (Deduplicated)
      type: goldtest_combined
    metrics:
    - type: exact_match_accuracy@1
      value: 0.6618
      name: Exact Match Accuracy@1
    - type: exact_match_mrr@10
      value: 0.7394
      name: Exact Match MRR@10
    - type: taboo_match_mrr@10
      value: 0.5448
      name: Taboo Match MRR@10
    - type: semantic_margin
      value: 0.1780
      name: Semantic Discrimination Margin
---

# Ows2-MiniLM — Ontology Alignment Model for Agri-Food Domains

**Ows2-MiniLM** is a sentence embedding model fine-tuned for **semantic alignment between scientific text and agri-food ontology terms**. 
It is part of the **OWS² (Ontology-based Workflow for Semantic Specialisation)** project developed at [INRAE](https://www.inrae.fr/) (French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment).

Given a sentence extracted from a scientific abstract or publication, the model retrieves the most semantically relevant ontology terms from a reference vocabulary of ~14 600 concepts covering plant science, food science, and agronomy domains.

The reference vocabulary incorporates concepts from:
- **TransformON**: [Nature Publication](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41538-023-00221-2)
- **Planteome**: [PubMed Publication](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38055832/)

> **Acknowledgement:** This work was supported by **INRAE Metaprogramme DIGIT-BIO** within the framework of the **SEED** project, and was carried out within the **Plateforme de Profilage Métabolique et de Métabolomique (P2M2)** — UMR 1349 IGEPP, INRAE.
---

## Model Details

| Property | Value |
|:---|:---|
| **Model name** | Ows2-MiniLM |
| **Base model** | [sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2](https://huggingface.co/sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2) |
| **Architecture** | Bi-encoder (Transformer + Mean Pooling + L2 Normalize) |
| **Output dimensionality** | 384 dimensions |
| **Maximum sequence length** | 512 tokens |
| **Similarity function** | Cosine similarity |
| **License** | [Apache 2.0](https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0) (inherits from base model) |
| **Training loss** | MultipleNegativesRankingLoss (asymmetric, in-batch negatives) |
| **Language** | English |
| **Domain** | Agri-food science (plant biology, food science, agronomy) |

### Full Model Architecture

```
SentenceTransformer(
  (0): Transformer({'architecture': 'BertModel'})
  (1): Pooling({'pooling_mode': 'mean'})
  (2): Normalize({})
)
```

---

## Intended Use

This model is designed for **ontology-based semantic search** in scientific literature, specifically:

- **Automatic annotation** of scientific abstracts with ontology concepts
- **Semantic retrieval** of the most relevant agri-food ontology terms given a sentence
- **Alignment** between free-text descriptions and controlled vocabularies (e.g., PPDO, AgroVoc-related thesauri)

> **Out-of-scope use:** This model is specialized for agri-food science. Performance on general-purpose or non-scientific text may be significantly lower.

---

## Usage

```python
from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer, util

model = SentenceTransformer("tcolombu/Ows2-MiniLM_1")

# A sentence from a scientific abstract
query = "Fruit-based sauces exhibited significant variations in antioxidant activity among different cultivars."

# Ontology terms to rank
ontology_terms = [
    "fruit sauce",
    "antioxidant activity",
    "barley powdery mildew disease response",
    "rootless",
]

# Encode and compute cosine similarities
query_embedding = model.encode(query, convert_to_tensor=True)
term_embeddings = model.encode(ontology_terms, convert_to_tensor=True)

scores = util.cos_sim(query_embedding, term_embeddings)[0]
ranked = sorted(zip(ontology_terms, scores.tolist()), key=lambda x: x[1], reverse=True)

for term, score in ranked:
    print(f"{score:.4f}  {term}")
# Expected top result: fruit sauce
```

---

## Evaluation

Two distinct evaluation protocols were used, each measuring different aspects of model performance. **Both are computed on the same 100-query expert goldtest**, but differ in corpus construction and scoring logic.

### Evaluator 1 — Standard IR (`InformationRetrievalEvaluator`)

> Called during training via `python main.py finetune --config <yaml>`

This is the standard `InformationRetrievalEvaluator` from the `sentence-transformers` library. Each ontology term is registered with a composite key `"{ontology_id}_{term}"`, meaning the **same surface form can appear multiple times** in the corpus if it has multiple ontology IDs. Relevance is checked by exact `doc_id` match only.

- **Corpus size:** ~14 600 entries (with duplicates)
- **Scoring:** Single exact `doc_id` match required
- **Stored in:** `metrics_comparison.json`

| Dataset | Acc@1 | Acc@3 | MRR@10 | NDCG@10 |
|:---|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|
| Validation set (15% of training data) | 39.68% | 53.66% | 48.08% | 51.85% |
| **Goldtest** (100 expert queries) | **55.00%** | **75.00%** | **66.63%** | 44.35% |

---

### Evaluator 2 — Combined Goldtest Benchmark (`CombinedGoldtestEvaluator`)

> Called post-training via `python main.py eval_model <model_path>`

A custom three-component evaluator. Terms are **deduplicated** to 14 544 unique surface forms. Synonymous ontology IDs sharing the same term are **merged**: a prediction is correct if any valid ID for the target term is retrieved. Queries are split into two subsets:

- **Exact Match**: the target term appears verbatim in the query sentence
- **Taboo Match**: the target term is *absent* from the query — pure semantic understanding required

| Subset | Acc@1 | Acc@3 | MRR@10 |
|:---|:---:|:---:|:---:|
| **Exact Match** | **66.18%** | **79.41%** | **73.94%** |
| **Taboo Match** | 37.50% | 68.75% | 54.48% |

| Semantic metric | Value |
|:---|:---:|
| Mean similarity (positive targets) | 0.5580 |
| Mean similarity (distractors) | 0.3801 |
| **Discrimination margin** | **0.1780** |
| Discrimination accuracy | 86.36% |

*Stored in: `goldtest_eval/combined_goldtest_metrics.json`*

> **Reading the two scores:** Evaluator 1 (66.63% MRR) is stricter because duplicated corpus entries act as additional distractors. Evaluator 2 (73.94% MRR) is more semantically faithful because synonyms of the correct answer are also accepted as valid.

---

### Baseline Comparison — `all-MiniLM-L6-v2` (no fine-tuning) vs `Ows2-MiniLM`

All metrics below are computed on **our agri-food ontology corpus** (not the standard sentence-transformers benchmarks). The base model has never seen this vocabulary.

#### Validation set — InformationRetrievalEvaluator (2 238 queries, ~14 400 corpus terms)

| Metric | Base `all-MiniLM-L6-v2` | **Ows2-MiniLM** | Δ Gain |
|:---|:---:|:---:|:---:|
| Accuracy@1 | 23.15% | **39.68%** | +16.5 pts |
| Accuracy@3 | 35.17% | **53.66%** | +18.5 pts |
| Accuracy@5 | 41.51% | **59.20%** | +17.7 pts |
| NDCG@10 | 34.46% | **51.85%** | +17.4 pts |
| MRR@10 | 30.76% | **48.08%** | +17.3 pts |

#### Goldtest — Expert benchmark (100 queries, ~14 600 corpus terms)

| Metric | Base `all-MiniLM-L6-v2` | **Ows2-MiniLM** | Δ Gain |
|:---|:---:|:---:|:---:|
| Accuracy@1 | 22.00% | **55.00%** | **+33.0 pts** |
| Accuracy@3 | 41.00% | **75.00%** | **+34.0 pts** |
| Accuracy@5 | 52.00% | **84.00%** | +32.0 pts |
| NDCG@10 | 24.16% | **44.35%** | +20.2 pts |
| MRR@10 | 34.81% | **66.63%** | **+31.8 pts** |

Fine-tuning on the OWS² mixed dataset (real + synthetic pairs) provides a **~+32 points absolute gain on Acc@1** and **~+32 points on MRR@10** on the expert goldtest, demonstrating the strong impact of domain specialisation even with limited real annotated data (~491 expert examples).

---

## Training Details

### Training Data

The model was trained on a **mixed dataset** combining real annotated data and LLM-generated synthetic pairs:

| Source | Examples | Description |
|:---|:---:|:---|
| Real annotations | ~491 | Expert-annotated (sentence, ontology term) pairs from scientific abstracts |
| Synthetic data | ~14 428 | Sentence/term pairs generated with **[Qwen](https://huggingface.co/Qwen)** (local inference), covering the full ontology vocabulary |
| **Total (85% train split)** | **~13 284** | Used for training |
| Validation (15%) | ~2 341 | Used for in-training evaluation |

- **Format:** `(anchor_sentence, positive_term, hard_negative_term)` triplets
- **Loss:** `MultipleNegativesRankingLoss` — uses all other items in the batch as implicit negatives
- **Synthetic generation LLM:** [Qwen](https://huggingface.co/Qwen) — run locally (Qwen2+ is Apache 2.0; Qwen1.x Tongyi license is compatible with domain-specific fine-tuned model publication)
- **Dataset file:** `mixed_dataset_v0_full.jsonl`

### Training Hyperparameters

| Parameter | Value |
|:---|:---:|
| Batch size | **16** |
| Learning rate | **2e-5** |
| Epochs | **15** |
| Warmup ratio | 0.1 |
| LR scheduler | Linear |
| Optimizer | AdamW |
| Freeze layers | 0 (full fine-tuning) |
| Seed | 42 |

> **Note on hyperparameter selection:** Batch size 16 with LR 2e-5 over 15 epochs was identified as the optimal configuration after a systematic grid search across 44 experiments. Increasing epochs beyond 15 showed no further gain (convergence plateau confirmed).

### Training Logs (validation NDCG@10 over 15 epochs)

<details><summary>Click to expand</summary>

| Epoch | Step | Training Loss | val_evaluator_cosine_ndcg@10 |
|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|
| 0.12 | 100 | 1.0499 | 0.3849 |
| 0.96 | 800 | 0.6236 | 0.4861 |
| 1.93 | 1600 | 0.4212 | 0.5072 |
| 3.01 | 2500 | 0.3228 | 0.5107 |
| 5.05 | 4200 | 0.1608 | 0.5094 |
| 7.10 | 5900 | 0.1085 | 0.5137 |
| 9.03 | 7500 | 0.0890 | 0.5177 |
| 11.07 | 9200 | 0.0667 | 0.5170 |
| 13.00 | 10800 | 0.0537 | 0.5173 |
| **15.00** | **12465** | — | **0.5185** |

</details>

### Training Time

- **Training:** ~10.7 minutes (NVIDIA GPU, SLURM cluster)
- **Evaluation:** ~7.8 minutes
- **Total:** ~18.5 minutes

---

## Limitations

- **Domain specificity:** The model is fine-tuned on agri-food science vocabulary. Performance on out-of-domain text (e.g., clinical, legal) is expected to be significantly lower.
- **Ontology coverage:** The reference ontology contains ~14 600 terms. Terms absent from this vocabulary cannot be retrieved.
- **Real data scarcity:** Only ~491 real annotated examples were available. Performance is expected to improve as the real annotation corpus grows.
- **Taboo match gap:** The 19-point gap between Exact Match MRR (73.94%) and Taboo Match MRR (54.48%) indicates the model still relies partially on lexical overlap. Improving semantic generalization is an identified next step.

---

## Framework Versions

- Python: 3.10.20
- Sentence Transformers: 5.6.0
- Transformers: 5.14.1
- PyTorch: 2.10.0+cu128
- Accelerate: 1.14.0
- Datasets: 5.0.0

---

## Citation

If you use this model, please cite:

```bibtex
@misc{ows2-minilm-2025,
  title        = {Ows2-MiniLM: An Ontology Alignment Model for Agri-Food Science},
  institution  = {INRAE, P2M2},
  note         = {OWS\textsuperscript{2} -- Ontology-based Workflow for Semantic Specialisation},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/tcolombu/Ows2-MiniLM_1}}
}
```

```bibtex
@inproceedings{reimers-2019-sentence-bert,
    title     = {Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks},
    author    = {Reimers, Nils and Gurevych, Iryna},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of EMNLP 2019},
    year      = {2019},
    url       = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10084}
}
```

### Related Poster

If you refer to this work, please also cite the related poster:
* **HAL Id:** `hal-05681918`
* **URL:** [https://hal.science/hal-05681918v1](https://hal.science/hal-05681918v1)