MIPA: Mutual Information Based Paraphrase Acquisition via Bilingual Pivoting

IJCNLP 2017 · Tomoyuki Kajiwara, Mamoru Komachi, Daichi Mochihashi ·

We present a pointwise mutual information (PMI)-based approach to formalize paraphrasability and propose a variant of PMI, called MIPA, for the paraphrase acquisition. Our paraphrase acquisition method first acquires lexical paraphrase pairs by bilingual pivoting and then reranks them by PMI and distributional similarity. The complementary nature of information from bilingual corpora and from monolingual corpora makes the proposed method robust. Experimental results show that the proposed method substantially outperforms bilingual pivoting and distributional similarity themselves in terms of metrics such as MRR, MAP, coverage, and Spearman{'}s correlation.