Sentence Transformers is joining Hugging Face!
Published October 22, 2025 Update on GitHub
Today, we are announcing that Sentence Transformers is transitioning from Iryna Gurevych’s Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab at the TU Darmstadt to Hugging Face. Hugging Face's Tom Aarsen has already been maintaining the library since late 2023 and will continue to lead the project. At its new home, Sentence Transformers will benefit from Hugging Face's robust infrastructure, including continuous integration and testing, ensuring that it stays up-to-date with the latest advancements in Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing.
Sentence Transformers (a.k.a. SentenceBERT or SBERT) is a popular open-source library for generating high-quality embeddings that capture semantic meaning. Since its inception by Nils Reimers in 2019, Sentence Transformers has been widely adopted by researchers and practitioners for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including semantic search, semantic textual similarity, clustering, and paraphrase mining. After years of development and training by and for the community, over 16,000 Sentence Transformers models are publicly available on the Hugging Face Hub, serving more than a million monthly unique users.
"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 AI. I would also like to thank all the users and especially the contributors, without whom this project would not be what it is today. And finally, I would like to thank Tom and Hugging Face for taking the project into the future."
Prof. Dr. Iryna Gurevych, Director of the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab, TU Darmstadt
"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."
Clem Delangue, co-founder & CEO, Hugging Face
Sentence Transformers will remain a community-driven, open-source project, with the same open-source license (Apache 2.0) as before. Contributions from researchers, developers, and enthusiasts are welcome and encouraged. The project will continue to prioritize transparency, collaboration, and broad accessibility.
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