The Distributional Similarity of Sub-Parses

Julie Weeds, David J. Weir, Bill Keller

Abstract: This work explores computing distributional similarity between sub-parses, i. e., fragments of a parse tree, as an extension to general lexical distributional similarity techniques. In the same way that lexical distributional similarity is used to estimate lexical semantic similarity, we propose using distributional similarity between subparses to estimate the semantic similarity of phrases. Such a technique will allow us to identify paraphrases where the component words are not semantically similar. We demonstrate the potential of the method by applying it to a small number of examples and showing that the paraphrases are more similar than the non-paraphrases.