UOW: Semantically Informed Text Similarity

Abstract

The UOW submissions to the Semantic Textual Similarity task at SemEval-2012 use a supervised machine learning algorithm along with features based on lexical, syntactic and semantic similarity metrics to predict the semantic equivalence between a pair of sentences. The lexical metrics are based on wordoverlap. A shallow syntactic metric is based on the overlap of base-phrase labels. The semantically informed metrics are based on the preservation of named entities and on the alignment of verb predicates and the overlap of argument roles using inexact matching. Our submissions outperformed the official baseline, with our best system ranked above average, but the contribution of the semantic metrics was not conclusive. 1