Chinese Whispers: Cooperative Paraphrase Acquisition

Matteo Negri, Yashar Mehdad, Alessandro Marchetti, Danilo Giampiccolo, Luisa Bentivogli


Abstract
We present a framework for the acquisition of sentential paraphrases based on crowdsourcing. The proposed method maximizes the lexical divergence between an original sentence s and its valid paraphrases by running a sequence of paraphrasing jobs carried out by a crowd of non-expert workers. Instead of collecting direct paraphrases of s, at each step of the sequence workers manipulate semantically equivalent reformulations produced in the previous round. We applied this method to paraphrase English sentences extracted from Wikipedia. Our results show that, keeping at each round n the most promising paraphrases (i.e. the more lexically dissimilar from those acquired at round n-1), the monotonic increase of divergence allows to collect good-quality paraphrases in a cost-effective manner.
Anthology ID:
L12-1452
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
2659–2665
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/772_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Matteo Negri, Yashar Mehdad, Alessandro Marchetti, Danilo Giampiccolo, and Luisa Bentivogli. 2012. Chinese Whispers: Cooperative Paraphrase Acquisition. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 2659–2665, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Chinese Whispers: Cooperative Paraphrase Acquisition (Negri et al., LREC 2012)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/772_Paper.pdf