A Comparison of Two Paraphrase Models for Taxonomy Augmentation

Vassilis Plachouras, Fabio Petroni, Timothy Nugent, Jochen L. Leidner


Abstract
Taxonomies are often used to look up the concepts they contain in text documents (for instance, to classify a document). The more comprehensive the taxonomy, the higher recall the application has that uses the taxonomy. In this paper, we explore automatic taxonomy augmentation with paraphrases. We compare two state-of-the-art paraphrase models based on Moses, a statistical Machine Translation system, and a sequence-to-sequence neural network, trained on a paraphrase datasets with respect to their abilities to add novel nodes to an existing taxonomy from the risk domain. We conduct component-based and task-based evaluations. Our results show that paraphrasing is a viable method to enrich a taxonomy with more terms, and that Moses consistently outperforms the sequence-to-sequence neural model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to augment taxonomies with paraphrases.
Anthology ID:
N18-2051
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Marilyn Walker, Heng Ji, Amanda Stent
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
315–320
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-2051
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-2051
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vassilis Plachouras, Fabio Petroni, Timothy Nugent, and Jochen L. Leidner. 2018. A Comparison of Two Paraphrase Models for Taxonomy Augmentation. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers), pages 315–320, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Comparison of Two Paraphrase Models for Taxonomy Augmentation (Plachouras et al., NAACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-2051.pdf