Idiom Paraphrases: Seventh Heaven vs Cloud Nine

Abstract

The goal of paraphrase identification is to decide whether two given text fragments have the same meaning. Of particular interest in this area is the identification of paraphrases among short texts, such as SMS and Twitter. In this paper, we present idiomatic expressions as a new domain for short-text paraphrase identification. We propose a technique, utilizing idiom definitions and continuous space word representations that performs competitively on a dataset of 1.4K annotated idiom paraphrase pairs, which we make publicly available for the research community.