Mutaphrase: Paraphrasing with FrameNet

We describe a preliminary version of Mutaphrase, a system that generates paraphrases of semantically labeled input sentences using the semantics and syntax encoded in FrameNet, a freely available lexicosemantic database. The algorithm generates a large number of paraphrases with a wide range of syntactic and semantic distances from the input. For example, given the input “I like eating cheese”, the system outputs the syntactically distant “Eating cheese is liked by me”, the semantically distant “I fear sipping juice”, and thousands of other sentences. The wide range of generated paraphrases makes the algorithm ideal for a range of statistical machine learning problems such as machine translation and language modeling as well as other semanticsdependent tasks such as query and language generation.