Components for a semantic textual similarity system

Focus on word and sentence similarity Formal side: define similarity in principle

Characterizing word meaning in context

Given a word in a particular sentence context: Can we characterize its meaning without reference to dictionary senses? Why?
For many lemmas, hard to draw sentence boundaries (-> Kilgarriff, Hanks in lexicography; Kintsch in cognition; Cruse, Tuggy in cognitive linguistics)

Characterizing word meaning in context

How?
Compute vector space representation for word in particular sentence context Read off: contextually appropriate paraphrases

Approaches
Make clusters that correspond to senses. In given context, compute weighting over clusters / choose cluster (Reisinger & Mooney, Dinu & Lapata) One vector per word: mixes senses
Use context to bend word vector, adapt it to given context (Mitchell & Lapata, Erk & Pado, Thater et al)

Language modeling (Washtell, Moon & Erk)

Using contextualized word vectors

Part of sentence similarity approach (Reddy et al) Paraphrases Determine inference rule applicability

Viewpoint from vector space approaches to sentence similarity

Mitchell & Lapata; Clark, Coecke, Sadrzadeh, Grefenstette; Baroni & Zamparelli, Socher et al Mostly applied to phrase pairs / sentence pairs with same structure Even Socher et al seem to focus on cases with mostly parallel sentence structure

Similarity between sentences of dissimilar structure

Central: MWE and alternation detection lemma-specific paraphrases and MWEs: covered by automatically induced inference rules alternations:
passivization John broke the vase / the vase broke

Principled approach: Graph rewriting system to transform sentence structure (Bar-Haim et al)

A plug for events and SRL

Central: identifying events & participants about which the sentences speak Semantically equivalent sentences talk about the same events Hence, SRL, coreference

A plug for events and SRL

Once events have been identified:
time and date expressions modals negation embedded propositions