Context sensitive paraphrasing with a global unsupervised classifier

Lexical paraphrasing is an inherently context sensitive problem because a word's meaning depends on context. Most paraphrasing work finds patterns and templates that can replace other patterns or templates in some context, but we are attempting to make decisions for a specific context. In this paper we develop a global classifier that takes a word v and its context, along with a candidate word u, and determines whether u can replace v in the given context while maintaining the original meaning. We develop an unsupervised, bootstrapped, learning approach to this problem. Key to our approach is the use of a very large amount of unlabeled data to derive a reliable supervision signal that is then used to train a supervised learning algorithm. We demonstrate that our approach performs significantly better than state-of-the-art paraphrasing approaches, and generalizes well to unseen pairs of words.