Automatic generation of large-scale paraphrases

Research on paraphrase has mostly focussed on lexical or syntactic variation within individual sentences. Our concern is with larger-scale paraphrases, from multiple sentences or paragraphs to entire documents. In this paper we address the problem of generating paraphrases of large chunks of texts. We ground our discussion through a worked example of extending an existing NLG system to accept as input a source text, and to generate a range of fluent semantically-equivalent alternatives, varying not only at the lexical and syntactic levels, but also in document structure and layout

A large annotated corpus for learning natural language inference

Understanding entailment and contradiction is fundamental to understanding natural language, and inference about entailment and contradiction is a valuable testing ground for the development of semantic representations. However, machine learning research in this area has been dramatically limited by the lack of large-scale resources. To address this, we introduce the Stanford Natural Language Inference corpus, a new, freely available collection of labeled sentence pairs, written by humans doing a novel grounded task based on image captioning. At 570K pairs, it is two orders of magnitude larger than all other resources of its type. This increase in scale allows lexicalized classifiers to outperform some sophisticated existing entailment models, and it allows a neural network-based model to perform competitively on natural language inference benchmarks for the first time.Comment: To appear at EMNLP 2015. The data will be posted shortly before the conference (the week of 14 Sep) at http://nlp.stanford.edu/projects/snli

An Evaluation of Inter-Annotator Agreement in the Observation of Anaphoric and Referential Relations

International audienceWhen proposing a description of the data he observes, the linguist must make sure that his observations may be also regularly made by other persons. In this paper, we introduce a typology of anaphoric and referential relations and an experiment which aims at assessing that this typology is operational. Given three newspaper articles, five students were asked to identify anaphoric and/or referential relations between expressions and referents. This inter-subjectivity test confirms results already obtained: coreference is an operational notion, but the perspicuity of other relations is not obvious