Task-Oriented Paraphrase Analytics
Marcel Gohsen Matthias Hagen Martin Potthast Benno Stein
Since paraphrasing is an ill-defined task, the term "paraphrasing" covers
text transformation tasks with different characteristics. Consequently,
existing paraphrasing studies have applied quite different (explicit and
implicit) criteria as to when a pair of texts is to be considered a paraphrase,
all of which amount to postulating a certain level of semantic or lexical
similarity. In this paper, we conduct a literature review and propose a
taxonomy to organize the 25~identified paraphrasing (sub-)tasks. Using
classifiers trained to identify the tasks that a given paraphrasing instance
fits, we find that the distributions of task-specific instances in the known
paraphrase corpora vary substantially. This means that the use of these
corpora, without the respective paraphrase conditions being clearly defined
(which is the normal case), must lead to incomparable and misleading results.