Introduction to Special Section on Paraphrasing

摘要

Paraphrasing, conveying the same meaning in different ways, is an intrinsic part of natural languages. The research field of Automatic Paraphrasing encompasses the tasks of collecting, identifying, and generating paraphrases in an automatic or a computer-aided manner. In addition, researchers have investigated the contribution of automatic paraphrasing techniques to many natural language applications, such as question answering (QA), information extraction (IE), multi-document summarization (MDS), and machine translation (MT). For example, in Machine Translation, paraphrases have been used for rewriting and simplifying input sentences, enlarging translation phrase tables, expanding human references for automatic evaluation, and so forth.