Paraphrasing Using Given and New Information in a Question-Answer System

The design and implementation of a paraphrase component for a natural language question-answer system (CO-OP) is presented. A major point made is the role of given and new information in formulating a paraphrase that differs in a meaningful way from the user\u27s question. A description is also given of the transformational grammar used by the paraphraser to generate questions

A Survey of Paraphrasing and Textual Entailment Methods

Paraphrasing methods recognize, generate, or extract phrases, sentences, or longer natural language expressions that convey almost the same information. Textual entailment methods, on the other hand, recognize, generate, or extract pairs of natural language expressions, such that a human who reads (and trusts) the first element of a pair would most likely infer that the other element is also true. Paraphrasing can be seen as bidirectional textual entailment and methods from the two areas are often similar. Both kinds of methods are useful, at least in principle, in a wide range of natural language processing applications, including question answering, summarization, text generation, and machine translation. We summarize key ideas from the two areas by considering in turn recognition, generation, and extraction methods, also pointing to prominent articles and resources.Comment: Technical Report, Natural Language Processing Group, Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece, 201

Can paraphrasing increase the amount and accuracy of reports from child eyewitnesses?

Young children’s descriptions of sexual abuse are often sparse thus creating the need for techniques that elicit lengthier accounts. ‘Paraphrasing’, or repeating information children have just disclosed, is a technique sometimes used by forensic interviewers to clarify or elicit information. (e.g., if a child stated “He touched me”, an interviewer could respond “He touched you?”). However, the effects of paraphrasing have yet to be scientifically assessed. The impact of different paraphrasing styles on young children’s reports was investigated. Overall, paraphrasing per se did not improve the length, richness, or accuracy of reports when compared to open-ended prompts such as “tell me more,” but some styles of paraphrasing were more beneficial than others. The results provide clear recommendations for investigative interviewers about how to use paraphrasing appropriately, and which practices can compromise the quality of children’s reports

Plagiarism in philosophy: prevention better than cure

[Introduction] Plagiarism more common than thought in student essays’ would make a good headline. Recent research suggests that students admit to much more plagiarism and other forms of cheating than teachers generally suspect, and it is widely believed that the problem is increasing as a result of the internet. The solution is to use a range of techniques to get the thought back into student essay writing, and to take more active steps to spot when this has not happened