A hybrid approach for paraphrase identification based on knowledge-enriched semantic heuristics

Muhidin Mohamed*, Mourad Oussalah

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach for sentence paraphrase identification. The proposal addresses the problem of evaluating sentence-to-sentence semantic similarity when the sentences contain a set of named-entities. The essence of the proposal is to distinguish the computation of the semantic similarity of named-entity tokens from the rest of the sentence text. More specifically, this is based on the integration of word semantic similarity derived from WordNet taxonomic relations, and named-entity semantic relatedness inferred from Wikipedia entity co-occurrences and underpinned by Normalized Google Distance. In addition, the WordNet similarity measure is enriched with word part-of-speech (PoS) conversion aided with a Categorial Variation database (CatVar), which enhances the lexico-semantics of words. We validated our hybrid approach using two different datasets; Microsoft Research Paraphrase Corpus (MSRPC) and TREC-9 Question Variants. In our empirical evaluation, we showed that our system outperforms baselines and most of the related state-of-the-art systems for paraphrase detection. We also conducted a misidentification analysis to disclose the primary sources of our system errors.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)457–485
    JournalLanguage Resources and Evaluation
    Volume54
    Early online date16 Apr 2019
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Jun 2020

    Bibliographical note

    © The Author(s) 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

    Keywords

    • Named-entity semantic relatedness
    • Paraphrase identification
    • Wikipedia
    • Word category subsumption
    • WordNet

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