String Re-writing Kernel

Learning for sentence re-writing is a fundamental task in natural language processing and information retrieval. In this paper, we propose a new class of kernel functions, referred to as string re-writing kernel, to address the problem. A string re-writing kernel measures the similarity between two pairs of strings, each pair representing re-writing of a string. It can capture the lexical and structural similarity between two pairs of sentences without the need of constructing syntactic trees. We further propose an instance of string rewriting kernel which can be computed efficiently. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our method can achieve better results than state-of-the-art methods on two sentence re-writing learning tasks: paraphrase identification and recognizing textual entailment.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Fan Bu, Hang Li, Xiaoyan Zhu
• Keywords: ACL 2012, Computational Linguistics, Kernel Functions, Natural Language Processing, Syntactic Trees