RTM at SemEval-2016 task 1: Predicting semantic similarity with referential translation machines and related statistics

Abstract

We use referential translation machines (RTMs) for predicting the semantic similarity of text in both STS Core and Cross-lingual STS. RTMs pioneer a language independent approach to all similarity tasks and remove the need to access any task or domain specific information or resource. RTMs become 14th out of 26 submissions in Cross-lingual STS. We also present rankings of various prediction tasks using the performance of RTM in terms of MRAER, a normalized relative absolute error metric.