Extracting Paraphrases from Definition Sentences on the Web

We propose an automatic method of extracting paraphrases from definition sentences, which are also automatically acquired from the Web. We observe that a huge number of concepts are defined in Web documents, and that the sentences that define the same concept tend to convey mostly the same information using different expressions and thus contain many paraphrases. We show that a large number of paraphrases can be automatically extracted with high precision by regarding the sentences that define the same concept as parallel corpora. Experimental results indicated that with our method it was possible to extract about 300,000 paraphrases from 6× 10 Web documents with a precision rate of about 94%.