Paraphrasing and translation
Chris Callison-Burch · 2007
Paraphrasing and translation have previously been treated as unconnected natural lan-guage processing tasks. Whereas translation represents the preservation of meaning when an idea is rendered in the words in a different language, paraphrasing represents the preservation of meaning when an idea is expressed using different words in the same language. We show that the two are intimately related. The major contributions of this thesis are as follows: • We define a novel technique for automatically generating paraphrases using bilingual parallel corpora, which are more commonly used as training data for statistical models of translation. • We show that paraphrases can be used to improve the quality of statistical ma-chine translation by addressing the problem of coverage and introducing a degree of generalization into the models. • We explore the topic of automatic evaluation of translation quality, and show that the current standard evaluation methodology cannot be guaranteed to correlate