Vladyslav Fesenko
2026
Mining Native Ukrainian Paraphrases: A Multi-Source Comparison
Vladyslav Fesenko | Hanna Dydyk-Meush | Volodymyr Mudryi
Proceedings of the Fifth Ukrainian Natural Language Processing Conference (UNLP 2026)
Vladyslav Fesenko | Hanna Dydyk-Meush | Volodymyr Mudryi
Proceedings of the Fifth Ukrainian Natural Language Processing Conference (UNLP 2026)
We introduce a Ukrainian paraphrase dataset mined from event-aligned news headlines and compare it with translated and LLM-generated data sources. Candidate pairs are retrieved from native Ukrainian news titles and filtered using semantic and lexical constraints to form a training corpus in a semi-automatic pipeline. Human evaluation indicates that the sources differ in useful ways: LLM-generated paraphrases are generally stronger in meaning preservation, whereas news-mined pairs offer greater lexical variation while remaining fluent and meaning-preserving. We tune mT5-large and mT0-large and evaluate them on several held-out test sets, including a human-validated subset. Relative to Spivavtor-large, the models achieve comparable semantic preservation with lower copying on the combined and human-validated sets. Overall, the findings highlight the value of naturally mined Ukrainian paraphrases as supervision for low-resource paraphrase generation.