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ACL Findings2023

Unsupervised Paraphrasing of Multiword Expressions

Takashi Wada, Yuji Matsumoto, Timothy Baldwin, Jey Han Lau

Abstract

We propose an unsupervised approach to paraphrasing multiword expressions (MWEs) in context. Our model employs only monolingual corpus data and pre-trained language models (without fine-tuning), and does not make use of any external resources such as dictionaries. We evaluate our method on the SemEval 2022 idiomatic semantic text similarity task, and show that it outperforms all unsupervised systems and rivals supervised systems. 1

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Cited by top-tier papers1

  1. Revisiting a Pain in the Neck: A Semantic Reasoning Benchmark for Language ModelsYang Liu, Hongming Li, Melissa Xiaohui Qin, Chao Huang et al.ACL 2026

Builds on9

  1. ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language RepresentationsZhenzhong Lan, Mingda Chen, Sebastian Goodman, Kevin Gimpel et al.ICLR 2020 · 7,418 citations
  2. BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and ComprehensionMike Lewis, Yinhan Liu, Naman Goyal, Marjan Ghazvininejad et al.ACL 2020 · 1,224 citations
  3. Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at ScaleAlexis Conneau, Kartikay Khandelwal, Naman Goyal, Vishrav Chaudhary et al.ACL 2020 · 539 citations
  4. A Monolingual Approach to Contextualized Word Embeddings for Mid-Resource LanguagesPedro Javier Ortiz Suárez, Laurent Romary, Benoît SagotACL 2020 · 72 citations
  5. AStitchInLanguageModels: Dataset and Methods for the Exploration of Idiomaticity in Pre-Trained Language ModelsHarish Tayyar Madabushi, Edward Gow-Smith, Carolina Scarton, Aline VillavicencioEMNLP Findings 2021 · 32 citations

Related papers

  1. Idiomatic Expression Paraphrasing without Strong SupervisionJianing Zhou, Ziheng Zeng, Hongyu Gong, Suma BhatAAAI 2022 · 12 citations
  2. Unsupervised Paraphrasing by Simulated AnnealingXianggen Liu, Lili Mou, Fandong Meng, Hao Zhou et al.ACL 2020 · 74 citations
  3. Easy as PIE? Identifying Multi-Word Expressions with LLMsKai Golan Hashiloni, Ofri Hefetz, Kfir BarEMNLP 2025
  4. Looking inside Noun Compounds: Unsupervised Prepositional and Free Paraphrasing using Language ModelsGirishkumar Ponkiya, V. Rudra Murthy, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Girish Keshav PalshikarEMNLP Findings 2020 · 11 citations
  5. Unsupervised Lexical Simplification with Context AugmentationTakashi Wada, Timothy Baldwin, Jey Han LauEMNLP Findings 2023 · 3 citations
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