ParaAMR: A Large-Scale Syntactically Diverse Paraphrase Dataset by AMR Back-Translation

Kuan-Hao Huang, Varun Iyer, I-Hung Hsu, Anoop Kumar, Kai-Wei Chang, Aram Galstyan


Abstract
Paraphrase generation is a long-standing task in natural language processing (NLP). Supervised paraphrase generation models, which rely on human-annotated paraphrase pairs, are cost-inefficient and hard to scale up. On the other hand, automatically annotated paraphrase pairs (e.g., by machine back-translation), usually suffer from the lack of syntactic diversity – the generated paraphrase sentences are very similar to the source sentences in terms of syntax. In this work, we present ParaAMR, a large-scale syntactically diverse paraphrase dataset created by abstract meaning representation back-translation. Our quantitative analysis, qualitative examples, and human evaluation demonstrate that the paraphrases of ParaAMR are syntactically more diverse compared to existing large-scale paraphrase datasets while preserving good semantic similarity. In addition, we show that ParaAMR can be used to improve on three NLP tasks: learning sentence embeddings, syntactically controlled paraphrase generation, and data augmentation for few-shot learning. Our results thus showcase the potential of ParaAMR for improving various NLP applications.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.447
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8047–8061
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.447
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.447
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kuan-Hao Huang, Varun Iyer, I-Hung Hsu, Anoop Kumar, Kai-Wei Chang, and Aram Galstyan. 2023. ParaAMR: A Large-Scale Syntactically Diverse Paraphrase Dataset by AMR Back-Translation. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 8047–8061, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ParaAMR: A Large-Scale Syntactically Diverse Paraphrase Dataset by AMR Back-Translation (Huang et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.447.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.447.mp4