ASE@DPIL-FIRE2016: Hindi Paraphrase Detection using Natural Language Processing Techniques & Semantic Similarity Computations

The paper reports the approaches utilized and results achieved for our system in the shared task (in FIRE-2016) for paraphrase identification in Indian languages (DPIL). Since Indian languages have a complex inherent nature, paraphrase identification in these languages becomes a challenging task. In the DPIL task, the challenge is to detect and identify whether a given sentence pairs paraphrased or not. In the proposed work, natural language processing with semantic concept extractions is explored for paraphrase detection in Hindi. Stop word removal, stemming and part of speech tagging are employed. Further similarity computations between the sentence pairs are done by extracting semantic concepts using WordNet lexical database. Initially, the proposed approach is evaluated over the given training sets using different machine learning classifiers. Then testing phase is used to predict the classes using the proposed features. The results are found to be promising, which shows the potency of natural language processing techniques and semantic concept extractions in detecting paraphrases.