Paraphrasing Compound Nominalizations

John Lee, Ho Hung Lim, Carol Webster


Abstract
A nominalization uses a deverbal noun to describe an event associated with its underlying verb. Commonly found in academic and formal texts, nominalizations can be difficult to interpret because of ambiguous semantic relations between the deverbal noun and its arguments. Our goal is to interpret nominalizations by generating clausal paraphrases. We address compound nominalizations with both nominal and adjectival modifiers, as well as prepositional phrases. In evaluations on a number of unsupervised methods, we obtained the strongest performance by using a pre-trained contextualized language model to re-rank paraphrase candidates identified by a textual entailment model.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.632
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8023–8028
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.632
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.632
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
John Lee, Ho Hung Lim, and Carol Webster. 2021. Paraphrasing Compound Nominalizations. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8023–8028, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Paraphrasing Compound Nominalizations (Lee et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.632.pdf