Paraphrases are sentences or phrases that convey the same meaning using different wording. Although the logical definition of paraphrases requires strict semantic equivalence, linguistics accepts a broader, approximate, equivalence—thereby allowing far more examples of “quasiparaphrase.” But approximate equivalence is hard to define. Thus, the phenomenon of paraphrases, as understood in linguis...

We present a novel method for ranking query paraphrases for effective search in community question answering (cQA). The method uses query logs from Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Answers for automatically extracting a corpus of paraphrases of queries and questions using the query-question click history. Elements of this corpus are automatically ranked according to recall and mean reciprocal rank, and...

Paraphrases have proved to be useful in many applications, including Machine Translation, Question Answering, Summarization, and Information Retrieval. Paraphrase acquisition methods that use a single monolingual corpus often produce only syntactic paraphrases. We present a method for obtaining surface paraphrases, using a 150GB (25 billion words) monolingual corpus. Our method achieves an accu...

This paper proposes a method that leverages multiple machine translation (MT) engines for paraphrase generation (PG). The method includes two stages. Firstly, we use a multi-pivot approach to acquire a set of candidate paraphrases for a source sentence S. Then, we employ two kinds of techniques, namely the selection-based technique and the decoding-based technique, to produce a best paraphrase ...