Expanding Paraphrase Lexicons by Exploiting Generalities

Abstract

Techniques for generating and recognizing paraphrases, i.e., semantically equivalent expressions, play an important role in a wide range of natural language processing tasks. In the last decade, the task of automatic acquisition of subsentential paraphrases, i.e., words and phrases with (approximately) the same meaning, has been drawing much attention in the research community. The core problem is to obtain paraphrases of high quality in large quantity. This article presents a method for tackling this issue by systematically expanding an initial seed lexicon made up of high-quality paraphrases. This involves automatically capturing morpho-semantic and syntactic generalizations within the lexicon and using them to leverage the power of large-scale monolingual data. Given an input set of paraphrases, our method starts by inducing paraphrase patterns that constitute generalizations over corresponding pairs of lexical variants, such as “amending” and “amendment,” in a fully empirical way. It then searches large-scale monolingual data for new paraphrases matching those patterns. The results of our experiments on English, French, and Japanese demonstrate that our method manages to expand seed lexicons by a large multiple. Human evaluation based on paraphrase substitution tests reveals that the automatically acquired paraphrases are also of high quality.