Web mining for lexical context-specific paraphrasing

In most applications of paraphrasing, contextual information should be considered since a word may have different paraphrases in different contexts. This paper presents a method that automatically acquires lexical context-specific paraphrases from the web. The method includes two main stages, candidate paraphrase extraction and paraphrase validation. Evaluations were conducted on a news title corpus whereby the context-specific paraphrasing method was compared with the Chinese synonymous thesaurus. Results show that the precision of our method is above 60% and the recall is above 55%, which outperforms the thesaurus significantly.