Identifying Paraphrases between Technical and Lay Corpora

In previous work, we presented a preliminary study to identify paraphrases between technical and lay discourse types from medical corpora dedicated to the French language. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that the same kinds of paraphrases as for French can be detected between English technical and lay discourse types and report the adaptation of our method from French to English. Starting from the constitution of monolingual comparable corpora, we extract two kinds of paraphrases: paraphrases between nominalizations and verbal constructions and paraphrases between neo-classical compounds and modern-language phrases. We do this relying on morphological resources and a set of extraction rules we adapt from the original approach for French. Results show that paraphrases could be identified with a rather good precision, and that these types of paraphrase are relevant in the context of the opposition between technical and lay discourse types. These observations are consistent with th...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: LREC
• Authors: Louise Deléger, Pierre Zweigenbaum
• Keywords: Education, Lay Discourse Types, LREC 2010, Monolingual Comparable Corpora, Paraphrase