Paraphrasing Compound Nominalizations

John Lee; Ho Hung Lim; Carol Webster

EMNLP 2021main3 citations

Paraphrasing Compound Nominalizations

Abstract

A nominalization uses a deverbal noun to describe an event associated with its underlying verb. Commonly found in academic and formal texts, nominalizations can be difficult to interpret because of ambiguous semantic relations between the deverbal noun and its arguments. Our goal is to interpret nominalizations by generating clausal paraphrases. We address compound nominalizations with both nominal and adjectival modifiers, as well as prepositional phrases. In evaluations on a number of unsupervised methods, we obtained the strongest performance by using a pre-trained contextualized language model to re-rank paraphrase candidates identified by a textual entailment model.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{lee-etal-2021-paraphrasing,
    title = "Paraphrasing Compound Nominalizations",
    author = "Lee, John  and
      Lim, Ho Hung  and
      Webster, Carol",
    editor = "Moens, Marie-Francine  and
      Huang, Xuanjing  and
      Specia, Lucia  and
      Yih, Scott Wen-tau",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.632/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.632",
    pages = "8023--8028"
}