intfloat-multilingual-e5-base-tr-nli

e5-tr-nli — Turkish Sentence Embedding Model (Bi-Encoder)

A Turkish sentence-embedding (bi-encoder) model for retrieval and semantic search, fine-tuned from intfloat/multilingual-e5-base with contrastive learning (MultipleNegativesRankingLoss) on Turkish NLI triplets.

• Embedding dimension: 768
• Max sequence length: 256 tokens (trained); backbone supports 512
• Pooling: mean pooling
• Similarity function: cosine
• Parameters: ~278M (XLM-RoBERTa-base backbone)
• Prefix convention: e5-style query: / passage: (see Usage — required)

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Table of Contents

1. Intended Use
2. Usage
3. Training Data
4. Training Procedure
5. Evaluation
6. TR-MTEB Results
7. Limitations & Biases
8. Compute & Environmental Impact
9. Licensing
10. Citation
11. Reproduction

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Intended Use

In scope

• Turkish semantic search / passage retrieval (dense retrieval, RAG)
• Semantic textual similarity, paraphrase & duplicate detection
• Clustering and topic grouping of Turkish text
• Feature extraction for downstream Turkish NLP classifiers

Out of scope

• Re-ranking with query–document cross-attention (use a cross-encoder instead)
• Long-document embedding beyond 256 tokens without chunking
• High-stakes decisions (legal, medical, hiring) without human oversight
• Non-Turkish text (backbone is multilingual, but this model is tuned for Turkish)

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Usage

⚠️ e5 prefixes are mandatory

The model was trained with the e5 asymmetric prefixes and must be used with them, consistently at training / evaluation / inference:

Omitting the prefixes degrades quality noticeably.

With sentence-transformers

from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer
from sentence_transformers.util import cos_sim

model = SentenceTransformer("thealper2/intfloat-multilingual-e5-base-tr-nli")

# Asymmetric retrieval: query vs. candidate passages
query = "query: Türkiye'nin başkenti neresidir?"
passages = [
    "passage: Ankara, Türkiye'nin başkentidir.",
    "passage: İstanbul Türkiye'nin en kalabalık şehridir.",
    "passage: Muz tropikal bir meyvedir.",
]
q = model.encode(query, normalize_embeddings=True)
p = model.encode(passages, normalize_embeddings=True)
print(cos_sim(q, p))   # highest score -> the Ankara passage

Semantic similarity (symmetric — use query: on both sides)

a = model.encode("query: Bugün hava çok güzel.", normalize_embeddings=True)
b = model.encode("query: Hava bugün oldukça güzel.", normalize_embeddings=True)
print(float(cos_sim(a, b)))   # ~0.9

With 🤗 Transformers (mean pooling)

import torch, torch.nn.functional as F
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModel

tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("thealper2/intfloat-multilingual-e5-base-tr-nli")
mdl = AutoModel.from_pretrained("thealper2/intfloat-multilingual-e5-base-tr-nli")

def encode(texts):
    batch = tok(texts, padding=True, truncation=True, max_length=256, return_tensors="pt")
    with torch.no_grad():
        out = mdl(**batch)
    mask = batch["attention_mask"].unsqueeze(-1).float()
    emb = (out.last_hidden_state * mask).sum(1) / mask.sum(1)   # mean pooling
    return F.normalize(emb, p=2, dim=1)

emb = encode(["query: örnek cümle", "passage: örnek pasaj"])

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Training Data

• Source: mertcobanov/all-nli-triplets-turkish — a machine-translated Turkish version of the AllNLI (SNLI + MultiNLI) triplet set.

• Format: (anchor, positive, negative) triplets, where the negative acts as a hard negative for the contrastive objective.

• Column handling: Only the Turkish columns (anchor_translated, positive_translated, negative_translated) were used and renamed to anchor / positive / negative. All English columns were discarded.

• Cleaning: rows with None / empty / whitespace-only fields were filtered out.

• Resulting sizes (after filtering):

  Split	Triplets
  train	277,167
  dev	6,584
  test	6,609

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Training Procedure

Objective

• Loss: CachedMultipleNegativesRankingLoss (MNRL with in-batch + hard negatives; the cached variant is used to simulate a large effective batch on limited VRAM).
• Batch sampler: NO_DUPLICATES (required for MNRL to avoid trivial in-batch collisions).
• In-batch negatives: every other positive/negative in the batch serves as a negative for a given anchor, so larger batches yield a stronger contrastive signal.

Hyperparameter search

An Optuna search (TPE sampler) was run before the final training:

Final training

Frameworks & hardware

• sentence-transformers 5.2.2, transformers 5.0.0, torch 2.11.0+cu128, datasets 4.4.1, Python 3.12
• 1× NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050 Laptop GPU (8 GB), CUDA 12.8

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Evaluation

Baseline (base model) vs. Final (this model)

Measured on the dataset's own test triplets (TripletEvaluator, cosine accuracy) and on the external Turkish STS set emrecan/stsb-mt-turkish (EmbeddingSimilarityEvaluator, Spearman; scores normalised 0–5 → 0–1):

Methodology notes for TR-MTEB

• Datasets pulled directly from HuggingFace (trmteb/*); metrics computed with a standalone script (no mteb package dependency), following standard MTEB protocols:
  • STS → Spearman of cosine vs. gold; Retrieval → nDCG@10 / Recall@10 / MAP@10 via exact cosine search; Classification → logistic regression on frozen embeddings (accuracy + macro-F1); PairClassification → average precision of cosine; Clustering → V-measure (MiniBatchKMeans, k = #labels); BitextMining → top-1 nearest-neighbour accuracy.
• e5 prefixes applied throughout (query: for queries/symmetric sides, passage: for corpus).
• Retrieval search runs on-GPU in fp16.
• 75haber, thy_sa, irony-tr have no train split in the trmteb org, so a seeded 70/30 stratified self-split was used for those classification tasks (marked note in trmteb_results.json). All other classification sets use their official train/test.

Category summary (macro averages)

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TR-MTEB Results (full)

Evaluated on the TR-MTEB datasets (Baysan & Güngör, TR-MTEB, Findings of EMNLP 2025).

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Limitations & Biases

• Translated training data. The NLI triplets are machine-translated; translation artefacts and noise are inherited, which can cap fine-grained semantic precision.
• Short-text bias. Trained on NLI-style short sentences at 256 tokens; long-document retrieval requires chunking and may underperform (see the lower fiqa/scidocs scores).
• Prefix sensitivity. Using the model without query:/passage: prefixes degrades results.
• Domain gaps. Scientific/financial retrieval (scidocs, fiqa) is weak; the model is strongest on general-domain QA-style retrieval (tquad, squad-tr, quora-tr).
• Societal bias. The backbone and NLI data may encode social biases; validate before deployment in sensitive settings.
• Single epoch. Trained for 1 epoch; longer schedules or larger effective batches may improve retrieval further.

Compute & Environmental Impact

• Single consumer laptop GPU (RTX 5050, 8 GB). Full pipeline (Optuna sweep + 1-epoch training on 277k triplets + evaluation) ran in a few GPU-hours. No multi-GPU/cluster training was used.

Licensing

• Backbone intfloat/multilingual-e5-base: MIT.
• Training data derives from AllNLI (SNLI is CC BY-SA 4.0; MultiNLI has mixed source licenses), translated to Turkish. Because the most restrictive component is CC BY-SA 4.0, this model card is released under CC BY-SA 4.0; verify that this suits your use case and comply with the ShareAlike terms.
• Evaluation datasets belong to their respective authors (see the trmteb org and emrecan/stsb-mt-turkish).

Citation

This model:

@misc{e5-tr-nli,
  title  = {e5-tr-nli: A Turkish Sentence Embedding Model},
  note   = {Fine-tuned from intfloat/multilingual-e5-base on Turkish NLI triplets},
  year   = {2026}
}

TR-MTEB benchmark:

@inproceedings{baysan-gungor-2025-trmteb,
  title     = {{TR-MTEB}: A Comprehensive Benchmark and Embedding Model Suite for {T}urkish Sentence Representations},
  author    = {Baysan, Mehmet Selman and G{\"u}ng{\"o}r, Tunga},
  booktitle = {Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025},
  year      = {2025}
}

Base model (E5):

@article{wang2024multilingual,
  title   = {Multilingual E5 Text Embeddings: A Technical Report},
  author  = {Wang, Liang and Yang, Nan and Huang, Xiaolong and Yang, Linjun and Majumder, Rangan and Wei, Furu},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.05672},
  year    = {2024}
}

Reproduction

The full pipeline (data prep, Optuna sweep, training, and TR-MTEB evaluation) is scripted:

• train_embedding_tr.py — --mode sweep | train | eval | mteb
• eval_trmteb_hf.py — TR-MTEB evaluation straight from HuggingFace trmteb/* datasets
• config.py, Makefile, requirements.txt

To publish (disabled by default — no secrets are used):

from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer
SentenceTransformer("models/e5-tr-nli-final").push_to_hub("thealper2/intfloat-multilingual-e5-base-tr-nli")