NUIG-UNLP at SemEval-2016 task 1: Soft alignment and deep learning for semantic textual similarity

Abstract

We present a multi-feature system for computing the semantic similarity between two sentences. We introduce the use of soft alignment for computing text similarity, and also evaluate different methods to produce it. The main features used by our system are based on alignment and Explicit Semantic Analysis. Our system was above the median scores for 4 out of the 5 datasets at SemEval 2016 STS Task 1.