In previous work, we presented a preliminary study to identify paraphrases between technical and lay discourse types from medical corpora dedicated to the French language. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that the same kinds of paraphrases as for French can be detected between English technical and lay discourse types and report the adaptation of our method from French to English. Starting...

We propose a method to acquire paraphrases from the Web in accordance with a given sentence query. For example, consider the query “Guavas are rich in vitamin c”. Its paraphrases are expressions or sentences that convey the same meaning but are different syntactically, such as “Guavas are well known for their high concentration of vitamin c”, or “Guavas are very high in vitamin c”. We aim at im...

For developing a data-driven text rewriting algorithm for paraphrasing, it is essential to have a monolingual corpus of aligned paraphrased sentences. News article headlines are a rich source of paraphrases; they tend to describe the same event in various different ways, and can easily be obtained from the web. We compare two methods of aligning headlines to construct such an aligned corpus of ...

Lexical paraphrasing aims at acquiring word-level paraphrases. It is critical for many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications, such as Question Answering (QA), Information Extraction (IE), and Machine Translation (MT). Since the meaning and usage of a word can vary in distinct contexts, different paraphrases should be acquired according to the contexts. However, most of the existing res...

We describe a system which ranks humanprovided paraphrases of noun compounds, where the frequency with which a given paraphrase was provided by human volunteers is the gold standard for ranking. Our system assigns a score to a paraphrase of a given compound according to the number of times it has co-occurred with other paraphrases in the rest of the dataset. We use these co-occurrence statistic...

This study presents a method to automatically acquire paraphrases using bilingual corpora, which utilizes the bilingual dependency relations obtained by projecting a monolingual dependency parse onto the other language sentence based on statistical alignment techniques. Since the paraphrasing method is capable of clearly disambiguating the sense of an original phrase using the bilingual context...

Paraphrasing of reference translations has been shown to improve the correlation with human judgements in automatic evaluation of machine translation (MT) outputs. In this work, we present a new dataset for evaluating English-Czech translation based on automatic paraphrases. We compare this dataset with an existing set of manually created paraphrases and find that even automatic paraphrases can...

We describe a mechanism for the generation of lexical paraphrases of queries posed to an Internet resource. These paraphrases are generated using WordNet and part-of-speech information to propose synonyms for the content words in the queries. Statistical information, obtained from a corpus, is then used to rank the paraphrases. We evaluated our mechanism using 404 queries whose answers reside i...

The Problem: The expressiveness of human language allows people to express the same idea in many different ways; they may use different words to refer to the same entity or employ different phrases to describe the same concept. Thus, an effective information retrieval (IR) and question answering (QA) system must be equipped to handle these variations, both when processing documents and when fie...

We suggest a new technique for deriving paraphrases from a monolingual corpus, supported by a relatively small set of comparable documents. Two somewhat similar phrases that each occur in one of a pair of documents dealing with the same incident are taken as potential paraphrases, which are evaluated based on the contexts in which they appear in the larger monolingual corpus. We apply this tech...