Paraphrase Collocation Extraction Based on Binary Classification

Abstract

Paraphrase collocations are collocations that convey the same meaning using different surface words.Paraphrase collocations are important in various natural language processing applications. However, it has not been widely researched. This paper addresses the problem of paraphrase collocation extraction using collocations with "OBJ" relationship as a case study. Specifically, the proposed method recasts paraphrase collocation extraction as a binary classification problem, which combines multiple features based on translation, thesaurus, polarity words, and web mining. Experimental results show that the binary classification based method is effective for paraphrase collocation extraction. Especially, the exploited features are all helpful for improving the extraction performance.Using the proposed method, we extract more than 280,000 pairs of paraphrase collocations, the precision of which is above 70%. Further experiments show that nearly 40% of sentences can be paraphrased using the extracted paraphrase collocations, which demonstrates that the proposed method is useful in practice.