English

From Paraphrase Database to Compositional Paraphrase Model and Back

Computation and Language 2015-08-28 v2

Abstract

The Paraphrase Database (PPDB; Ganitkevitch et al., 2013) is an extensive semantic resource, consisting of a list of phrase pairs with (heuristic) confidence estimates. However, it is still unclear how it can best be used, due to the heuristic nature of the confidences and its necessarily incomplete coverage. We propose models to leverage the phrase pairs from the PPDB to build parametric paraphrase models that score paraphrase pairs more accurately than the PPDB's internal scores while simultaneously improving its coverage. They allow for learning phrase embeddings as well as improved word embeddings. Moreover, we introduce two new, manually annotated datasets to evaluate short-phrase paraphrasing models. Using our paraphrase model trained using PPDB, we achieve state-of-the-art results on standard word and bigram similarity tasks and beat strong baselines on our new short phrase paraphrase tasks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1506.03487,
  title  = {From Paraphrase Database to Compositional Paraphrase Model and Back},
  author = {John Wieting and Mohit Bansal and Kevin Gimpel and Karen Livescu and Dan Roth},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.03487},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

2015 TACL paper updated with an appendix describing new 300 dimensional embeddings. Submitted 1/2015. Accepted 2/2015. Published 6/2015

R2 v1 2026-06-22T09:51:25.781Z