Enlarging Paraphrase Collections through Generalization and Instantiation
Atsushi Fujita, Pierre Isabelle, Roland Kühn · NPARC · 2012
This paper presents a paraphrase acquisition method that uncovers and exploits generali-ties underlying paraphrases: paraphrase pat-terns are first induced and then used to col-lect novel instances. Unlike existing methods, ours uses both bilingual parallel and monolin-gual corpora. While the former are regarded as a source of high-quality seed paraphrases, the latter are searched for paraphrases that match patterns learned from the seed paraphrases. We show how one can use monolingual cor-pora, which are far more numerous and larger than bilingual corpora, to obtain paraphrases that rival in quality those derived directly from bilingual corpora. In our experiments, the number of paraphrase pairs obtained in this way from monolingual corpora was a large multiple of the number of seed paraphrases. Human evaluation through a paraphrase sub-stitution test demonstrated that the newly ac-quired paraphrase pairs are of reasonable qual-ity. Remaining noise can be further reduced by filtering seed paraphrases. 1