Finding paraphrases using PNrule

Abstract

In this thesis, we attempt to use a machine-learning algorithm, PNrule, along with simple lexical and syntactic measures to detect paraphrases in cases where their existence is rare. We choose PNrule because it was specifically developed for classification in instances where the target class is rare compared to other classes within the data. We test our system both on a dataset we develop based on movie reviews, and on the PASCAL RTE dataset; we obtain poor results on the former, and moderately good results on the latter. We examine why this is the case, and suggest improvements for future research.