  Semantic similarity based retrieval is playing an increasingly important role
in many IR systems such as modern web search, question-answering, similar
document retrieval etc. Improvements in retrieval of semantically similar
content are very significant to applications like Quora, Stack Overflow, Siri
etc. We propose a novel unsupervised model for semantic similarity based
content retrieval, where we construct semantic flow graphs for each query, and
introduce the concept of "soft seeding" in graph based semi-supervised learning
(SSL) to convert this into an unsupervised model.
  We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on an equivalent question
retrieval problem on the Stack Exchange QA dataset, where our unsupervised
approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised models,
and produces comparable results to the best supervised models. Our research
provides a method to tackle semantic similarity based retrieval without any
training data, and allows seamless extension to different domain QA
communities, as well as to other semantic equivalence tasks.
