Mining Paraphrasal Typed Templates from a Plain Text Corpus

Finding paraphrases in text is an important task with implications for generation, summarization and question answering, among other applications. Of particular interest to those applications is the specific formulation of the task where the paraphrases are templated, which provides an easy way to lexicalize one message in multiple ways by simply plugging in the relevant entities. Previous work has focused on mining paraphrases from parallel and comparable corpora, or mining very short sub-sentence synonyms and paraphrases. In this paper we present an approach which combines distributional and KB-driven methods to allow robust mining of sentence-level paraphrasal templates, utilizing a rich type system for the slots, from a plain text corpus.