Extracting paraphrases from aligned corpora
Ali Ibrahim · DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) · 2002
Master of Engineering Synonymy in word and expression is a problem in many natural language analysis tasks. While single word resources for synonymy exist such as thesauri and Wordnet, there are few resources for multiple word synonyms or paraphrases. We attempt to implement an unsupervised technique for automatically extracting paraphrases from aligned mono-lingual corpora. By comparing relations between similar words in two aligned sentences, we can extract paraphrases. Paraphrases which occur often and in dierent contexts are scored higher. While the nal results were encouraging, the low density of paraphrases necessitates a much larger set of data. Such data is hard to obtain, because of the strict requirements of the alignment tool.