  Semantic matching is of central importance to many natural language tasks
\cite{bordes2014semantic,RetrievalQA}. A successful matching algorithm needs to
adequately model the internal structures of language objects and the
interaction between them. As a step toward this goal, we propose convolutional
neural network models for matching two sentences, by adapting the convolutional
strategy in vision and speech. The proposed models not only nicely represent
the hierarchical structures of sentences with their layer-by-layer composition
and pooling, but also capture the rich matching patterns at different levels.
Our models are rather generic, requiring no prior knowledge on language, and
can hence be applied to matching tasks of different nature and in different
languages. The empirical study on a variety of matching tasks demonstrates the
efficacy of the proposed model on a variety of matching tasks and its
superiority to competitor models.
