In previous work, we presented a preliminary study to identify paraphrases between technical and lay discourse types from medical corpora dedicated to the French language. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that the same kinds of paraphrases as for French can be detected between English technical and lay discourse types and report the adaptation of our method from French to English. Starting...

Paraphrasing constitutes a corner stone in many Natural Language Processing fields like monolingual text-to-text generation and automatic text summarization. Indeed, aligned monolingual corpora are likely to boost the learning process of text-to-text generation models. A Paraphrase learning strategy can be defined as a two-step process: (1) identifying and extracting related sentence pairs from...

Speakers tend to reproduce syntactic structures that they have recently comprehended or produced. This structural or syntactic priming occurs despite differences in the particular conceptual or event roles expressed in prime and target sentences (Bock & Loebell, 1990). In two sentence recall studies, we used the tendency of speakers to paraphrase the finite complements of object-raising verbs a...

One of the difficulties in Natural Language Processing is the fact that there are many way to express the same thing or event. These expressions are called “Paraphrases”. Paraphrase is important in applications such as IR, QA and IE, and one of the difficulties in paraphrase research is acquiring the requisite paraphrase knowledge. In this paper, we describe an unsupervised method to discover p...

We present a novel method for evaluating the output of Machine Translation (MT), based on comparing the dependency structures of the translation and reference rather than their surface string forms. Our method uses a treebank-based, widecoverage, probabilistic Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) parser to produce a set of structural dependencies for each translation-reference sentence pair, and th...

Whereas multilingual comparable corpora have been used to identify translations of words or terms, monolingual corpora can help identify paraphrases. The present work addresses paraphrases found between two different discourse types: specialized and lay texts. We therefore built comparable corpora of specialized and lay texts in order to detect equivalent lay and specialized expressions. We ide...

Question paraphrasing is critical in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications, especially for question reformulation in question answering (QA). However, choosing an appropriate data source and developing effective methods are challenging tasks. In this paper, we propose a method that exploits Encarta logs to automatically identify question paraphrases and extract templates. Question...

An experiment in the computer generation of coherent discourse was successfully conducted to test a hypothesis about the transitive nature of syntactic dependency relations among elements of the English language. The two primary components of the experimental computer program consisted of a phrase structure generation grammar capable of generating grammatical nonsense, and a monitoring system w...