Poster presented at the 2nd meeting of the COST Action CA16105 - enetCollect : European Network for Combining Language Learning with Crowdsourcing Techniques, which took place at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, in Iasi, Romania. This poster shows paraphrastic suggestions in the eSPERTo paraphrasing system applied to a QA application on a virtual agent and to a summarization tool. It also shows how paraphrases can be used in language learning and the tests envisaged to make eSPERTo a Portuguese learning tool.

1. Language Learning
with eSPERTo’s
Paraphrasing
System
Paraphrases
• Linguistic devices - allow to recognize
and generate equivalent forms of
expressing the same content, either oral
or written, i.e., of saying/writing the same
thing/idea using different wording or
syntactic structure
• Essential in human communication, both
in language production and
understanding
• Occur at various levels: multiword or
phrasal unit, phrase, expression,
sentence, paragraph, full text, etc.
• Growing importance in NLP, and a vital
and strategic area for future language
technology industries:
• Text production
• Dialogue systems
• Summarization
• Question-answering
• Information retrieval
• Machine translation
• Plagiarism detection
• E-learning + teaching and learning
of foreign and native languages
eSPERTo Paraphrasing
Edgar, Virtual QA Agent
(Fialho et al. 2013)
SSNT Summarization
(Ribeiro 2011)
QA and Summarization
Applications
• .
eSPERTo Project
• develop an automated paraphraser to assist writers and language learners in ©e-
learning
• eSPERTo has the challenging objectives of guaranteeing thorough knowledge of the
context, language fluency, appropriate style and consistent terminology (also
designed to enable the adaption of a text within the different variants of the
Portuguese language = variant adaptation, i.e., for dealing with the cultural, linguistic
and stylistic differences between variants, making it possible to convert texts from one
variant into another, adding clarity to texts and improving their readability, a key
function in paraphrasing systems.)
Funded by the Horizon
2020 Framework
Programme of the
European Union
• eSPERTo uses semantico-syntactic knowledge to identify multiwords and
other phrasal units, and applies local grammars to transform them into
semantically equivalent phrases, expressions, or sentences.
• The quantity and quality of the resources have been increasing considerably
with the integration of lexicon-grammar tables, because they contain
distributional and transformational properties of nominal predicates that can
be used in paraphrasing tasks with successful results. Three lexicon-
grammar tables have recently been added to expand eSPERTo's
paraphrastic capabilities:
I. the lexicon-grammar of human intransitive adjectives
II. (ii) the lexicon-grammar of predicate nouns co-occurring with the
support verb fazer (do or make)
III. (iii) the lexicon-grammar of predicate nouns which co-occur in
constructions with the support verb ser de (be of)
• The above resources allow the generation of paraphrases such as:
I. de origem portuguesa (of Portuguese origin/roots)
= portugueses (Portuguese)
= de Portugal (from Portugal)
II. Fez uma classificação de NP (made a classification of
NP}
= classificou NP (classified NP)
III. é de uma certa cortesia (is of a certain courtesy)
= é cortês (is courteous)
• eSPERTo has been explored in a QA and in a summarization tool,
but the LG integrated resources have not been tested in these
applications.
• We envisage to test the new paraphrastic resources in an e-
learning environment, to assist language learners with the
production, editing and revision of texts.
GAME – students fill in
gaps where text in gaps
may be paraphrases
QA - students answer to
questions in a test - the
correct answer can be
expressed in different
words
DESCRIPTION OF
IMAGES – students
describe in their own
words a particular
image/picture/video, etc.
SUMMARIZATION OF
A TEXT - students
create summaries of
texts using different
strategies to express the
most important ideas in
a text
TRANSLATION
- students of a foreign
language translate
sentences into their own
language. The
translations may contain
paraphrastic
expressions