Paraphrasing with search engine query logs

This paper proposes a method that extracts paraphrases from search engine query logs. The method first extracts paraphrase query-title pairs based on an assumption that a search query and its corresponding clicked document titles may mean the same thing. It then extracts paraphrase query-query and title-title pairs from the query-title paraphrases with a pivot approach. Paraphrases extracted in each step are validated with a binary classifier. We evaluate the method using a query log from Baidu, a Chinese search engine. Experimental results show that the proposed method is effective, which extracts more than 3.5 million pairs of paraphrases with a precision of over 70%. The results also show that the extracted paraphrases can be used to generate high-quality paraphrase patterns.