How AI Understands Entire Sentences
UKP Lab transfers further development of Sentence Transformers to Hugging Face
2025/10/22
The Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab at Technische Universität Darmstadt has officially transferred the stewardship and further development of Sentence Transformers, one of the world’s most widely used open-source libraries for semantic embeddings, to Hugging Face. The open-source software originated from research at the UKP Lab in 2019 and has since become one of the most important resources for artificial intelligence (AI) in language processing (Natural Language Processing, NLP). It enables entire sentences to be represented in such a way that computers can capture and compare their meaning.
Originally created by Dr. Nils Reimers and Professor Iryna Gurevych at the UKP Lab, Sentence Transformers has evolved from an innovative research project into a key technology that is now used by more than one million people worldwide every month. Over the past years, the collection has grown to more than 16,000 pre-trained Sentence Transformers models, which are available for immediate use on Hugging Face. This makes Sentence Transformers one of the most successful open-source projects in language processing and AI worldwide.
Tom Aarsen from Hugging Face, who has been maintaining the library since late 2023, will continue to lead its development. With the official transfer, the foundation is now laid for Sentence Transformers to benefit from Hugging Face’s powerful infrastructure, including continuous integration, extensive testing capacities, and enterprise-level support structures. The transfer illustrates how research results from TU Darmstadt continue to have a lasting impact through close collaboration with international partners.
It also marks an important milestone for the future of this pioneering NLP and AI tool, which has profoundly shaped work in semantic search, text similarity, and information retrieval. In the era of large language models, Sentence Transformers are more relevant than ever: they form the foundation of so-called RAG applications (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), in which language models are supplemented with external knowledge sources to provide more precise and verifiable answers.
Executive Statements
Prof. Iryna Gurevych, Director of the UKP Lab, TU Darmstadt, commented: “Sentence Transformers has been a huge success story and a culmination of our long-standing research on computing semantic similarities for the whole lab. Nils Reimers has made a very timely discovery and has produced not only outstanding research outcomes, but also a highly usable tool. This continues to impact generations of students and practitioners in natural language processing and artificial intelligence.”
Clem Delangue, co-founder & CEO of Hugging Face, stated: “We're thrilled to officially welcome Sentence Transformers into the Hugging Face family! Over the past two years, it's been amazing to see this project grow to massive global adoption, thanks to the incredible foundation from the UKP Lab and the amazing community around it. This is just the beginning: we'll keep doubling down on supporting its growth and innovation, while staying true to the open, collaborative spirit that made it thrive in the first place.”
UKP Lab
UKP Lab at Technische Universität Darmstadt is internationally recognized for its research excellence in natural language processing and machine learning. Led by Prof. Dr. Iryna Gurevych, the lab has developed numerous influential datasets, benchmarks, and open-source tools that advance both academic research and practical applications in AI.
Hugging Face
Hugging Face is the leading platform for machine learning collaboration, hosting the largest collection of models, datasets, and applications. The company's mission is to democratize AI through open source and open science, providing tools and infrastructure that make machine learning accessible to everyone.
UKP Lab
