Software paraphrases sentences

December 4, 2003 | Source: Technology Research News

Researchers at Cornell University have combined on-line journalism and computational biology to make it possible to automatically paraphrase whole sentences. The method could eventually allow computers to more easily process natural language, produce paraphrases that could be used in machine translation, and help people who have trouble reading certain types of sentences.

The researchers’ system uses word-based clustering methods to identify sets of text that have a high degree of overlapping words. It then uses computational biology techniques to identify sentence templates, or lattices. Lattices are made up of words or parallel sets of words that occur across several examples, and arguments. The challenge is to identify which sentence differences are due to lexical variability and which are due to different subjects.