Danni Ma, Chen Chen, Behzad Golshan, Wang-Chiew Tan
Paraphrases are important linguistic resources
for a wide variety of NLP applications. Many
techniques for automatic paraphrase mining
from general corpora have been proposed.
While these techniques are successful at discovering generic paraphrases, they often fail
to identify domain-specific paraphrases (e.g.,
{“staff ”, “concierge”} in the hospitality domain). This is because current techniques
are often based on statistical methods, while
domain-specific corpora are too small to fit statistical methods. In this paper, we present an
unsupervised graph-based technique to mine
paraphrases from a small set of sentences that
roughly share the same topic or intent. Our
system, ESSENTIA, relies on word-alignment
techniques to create a word-alignment graph
that merges and organizes tokens from input
sentences. The resulting graph is then used to
generate candidate paraphrases. We demonstrate that our system obtains high quality
paraphrases, as evaluated by crowd workers.
We further show that the majority of the identified paraphrases are domain-specific and thus
complement existing paraphrase databases.