A Unified Kernel Approach for Learning Typed Sentence Rewritings

Many high level natural language processing problems can be framed as determining if two given sentences are a rewriting of each other. In this paper, we propose a class of kernel functions, referred to as type-enriched string rewriting kernels, which, used in kernel-based machine learning algorithms, allow to learn sentence rewritings. Unlike previous work, this method can be fed external lexical semantic relations to capture a wider class of rewriting rules. It also does not assume preliminary syntactic parsing but is still able to provide a unified framework to capture syntactic structure and alignments between the two sentences. We experiment on three different natural sentence rewriting tasks and obtain state-of-the-art results for all of them.