Sentential Paraphrase Generation for Agglutinative Languages Using SVM with a String Kernel

Abstract

Paraphrase generation is widely used for various natural language processing (NLP) applications such as question answering, multi-document summarization, and machine translation. In this study, we identify the problems occurring in the process of applying existing probabilistic model-based methods to agglutinative languages, and provide solutions by reflecting the inherent characteristics of agglutinative languages. More specifically, we propose and evaluate a sentential paraphrase generation (SPG) method for the Korean language using Support Vector Machines (SVM) with a string kernel. The quality of generated paraphrases is evaluated using three criteria: (1) meaning preservation, (2) grammaticality, and (3) equivalence. Our experiment shows that the proposed method outperformed a probabilistic model-based method by 12%, 16%, and 17%, respectively, with respect to the three criteria.