We investigate lexical paraphrasing in the context of two distinct applications: document retrieval and node identification. Document retrieval --- the first step in question answering --- retrieves documents that contain answers to user queries. Node ...

Automatic evaluation of translation quality has proved to be useful when the target language is English. In this paper the evaluation of translation into Japanese is studied. An existing method based on n-gram similarity between translations and ...

This paper proposes a novel method to extract paraphrases of Japanese noun phrases from a set of documents. The proposed method consists of three steps: (1) retrieving passages using character-based index terms given a noun phrase as an input query, (2) ...

Automatically acquiring synonymous words (synonyms) from corpora is a challenging task. For this task, methods that use only one kind of resources are inadequate because of low precision or low recall. To improve the performance of synonym extraction, ...

We are trying to find paraphrases from Japanese news articles which can be used for Information Extraction. We focused on the fact that a single event can be reported in more than one article in different ways. However, certain kinds of noun phrases ...

We present an approach for automatically learning paraphrases from aligned monolingual corpora. Our algorithm works by generalizing the syntactic paths between corresponding anchors in aligned sentence pairs. Compared to previous work, structural ...

Our general research aim is to extract the actual intentions of persons when they respond to open-ended questionnaires. These intentions include the desire to make requests, complaints, expressions of resignation and so forth, but here we focus on ...

We describe an ongoing work in information extraction which is seen as a text normalization task. The normalized representation can be used to detect paraphrases in texts. Normalization and paraphrase detection tasks are built on top of a robust ...

We describe a set of paraphrase patterns for questions which we derived from a corpus of questions, and report the result of using them in the automatic recognition of question paraphrases. The aim of our paraphrase patterns is to factor out different ...

We present a Question Answering system for technical domains which makes an intelligent use of paraphrases to increase the likelihood of finding the answer to the user's question. The system implements a simple and efficient logic representation of ...

This paper proposes a new method of ranking near-synonyms ordered by their suitability of nuances in a particular context. Our method distincts near-synonyms by semantic features extracted from their definition statements in an ordinary dictionary, and ...

This paper describes our ongoing research project on text simplification for congenitally deaf people. Text simplification we are aiming at is the task of offering a deaf reader a syntactic and lexical paraphrase of a given text for assisting her/him to ...

Paraphrases, which stem from the variety of lexical and grammatical means of expressing meaning available in a language, pose challenges for a sentence generation system. In this paper, we discuss the generation of paraphrases from predicate/argument ...