Paraphrasing Tool Using the NooJ Platform

Abstract

The dissemination of scientific research is gaining momentum and provides an opportunity for novice and established researchers to contribute to their field. Therefore, there is a particularly great and growing demand for paraphrasing tools, which can effectively and efficiently aid researchers in rewriting sentences to avoid plagiarism. Moreover, paraphrasing is useful in several NLP applications such as question-answering, summarization or machine translation. The aim of paraphrasing is to generate different expressions with the same meaning. Over the past decades, several paraphrase tools have appeared. Nevertheless, these tools give unsatisfied results. For example, the generated sentence maybe does not jibe well the specificities of the given language such as the sentence structure. Nowadays, this issue can be achieved with the advent of new NLP tools. The aim of this paper is to propose a method to paraphrase sentences in French. Our proposal is based on transducers and dictionaries. It consists in replacing some words of the sentence by synonyms or antonyms with negation, or in switching to the passive form. In addition, we have divided these words into two parts – one part related to words starting with a vowel and another part for words that do not start with a vowel – in order to eliminate the ambiguity of the apostrophe form case. The linguistic resources are implemented using the NooJ platform. Experimentations of our paraphrasing tool show interesting results.