Multilingual Whispers: Generating Paraphrases with Translation
Christian Federmann, Oussama Elachqar, Chris Quirk · 2019
Naturally occurring paraphrase data, such as multiple news stories about the same event, is a useful but rare resource.This paper compares translation-based paraphrase gathering using human, automatic, or hybrid techniques to monolingual paraphrasing by experts and nonexperts.We gather translations, paraphrases, and empirical human quality assessments of these approaches.Neural machine translation techniques, especially when pivoting through related languages, provide a relatively robust source of paraphrases with diversity comparable to expert human paraphrases.Surprisingly, human translators do not reliably outperform neural systems.The resulting data release will not only be a useful test set, but will also allow additional explorations in translation and paraphrase quality assessments and relationships.