Siyu Qiu

Wuwei Lan, Siyu Qiu, Hua He et al.

A major challenge in paraphrase research is the lack of parallel corpora. In this paper, we present a new method to collect large-scale sentential paraphrases from Twitter by linking tweets through shared URLs. The main advantage of our method is its simplicity, as it gets rid of the classifier or human in the loop needed to select data before annotation and subsequent application of paraphrase identification algorithms in the previous work. We present the largest human-labeled paraphrase corpus to date of 51,524 sentence pairs and the first cross-domain benchmarking for automatic paraphrase identification. In addition, we show that more than 30,000 new sentential paraphrases can be easily and continuously captured every month at ~70% precision, and demonstrate their utility for downstream NLP tasks through phrasal paraphrase extraction. We make our code and data freely available.

Qing Cui, Bin Gao, Jiang Bian et al.

Neural network techniques are widely applied to obtain high-quality distributed representations of words, i.e., word embeddings, to address text mining, information retrieval, and natural language processing tasks. Recently, efficient methods have been proposed to learn word embeddings from context that captures both semantic and syntactic relationships between words. However, it is challenging to handle unseen words or rare words with insufficient context. In this paper, inspired by the study on word recognition process in cognitive psychology, we propose to take advantage of seemingly less obvious but essentially important morphological knowledge to address these challenges. In particular, we introduce a novel neural network architecture called KNET that leverages both contextual information and morphological word similarity built based on morphological knowledge to learn word embeddings. Meanwhile, the learning architecture is also able to refine the pre-defined morphological knowledge and obtain more accurate word similarity. Experiments on an analogical reasoning task and a word similarity task both demonstrate that the proposed KNET framework can greatly enhance the effectiveness of word embeddings.