Treebanks are key resources for developing accurate statistical parsers. However, building treebanks is expensive and timeconsuming for humans. For domains requiring deep subject matter expertise such as law and medicine, treebanking is even more difficult. To reduce annotation costs for these domains, we develop methods to improve cross-domain parsing inference using paraphrases. Paraphrases a...

Linguistically diverse datasets are critical for training and evaluating robust machine learning systems, but data collection is a costly process that often requires experts. Crowdsourcing the process of paraphrase generation is an effective means of expanding natural language datasets, but there has been limited analysis of the trade-offs that arise when designing tasks. In this paper, we pres...

Paraphrase generation is an important problem in NLP, especially in question answering, information retrieval, information extraction, conversation systems, to name a few. In this paper, we address the problem of generating paraphrases automatically. Our proposed method is based on a combination of deep generative models (VAE) with sequence-to-sequence models (LSTM) to generate paraphrases, giv...

Lexical paraphrasing aims at acquiring word-level paraphrases. It is critical for many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications, such as Question Answering (QA), Information Extraction (IE), and Machine Translation (MT). Since the meaning and usage of a word can vary in distinct contexts, different paraphrases should be acquired according to the contexts. However, most of the existing res...

As part of our project ParaPhraser on the identification and classification of Russian paraphrase, we have collected a corpus of more than 8000 sentence pairs annotated as precise, loose or non-paraphrases. The corpus is annotated via crowdsourcing by naïve native Russian speakers, but from the point of view of the expert, our complex paraphrase detection model can be more successful at predict...