Generating and selecting paraphrases

Natural language has a high paraphrastic power yet not all paraphrases are appropriate for all contexts. In this paper, we present a TAG based surface realiser which supports both the generation and the selection of paraphrases. To deal with the combinarial explosion typical of such an NP-complete task, we introduce a number of new optimisations in a tabular, bottom-up surface realisation algorithm. We then show that one of these optimisations supports paraphrase selection.