Leveraging multiple MT engines for paraphrase generation

This paper proposes a method that leverages multiple machine translation (MT) engines for paraphrase generation (PG). The method includes two stages. Firstly, we use a multi-pivot approach to acquire a set of candidate paraphrases for a source sentence S. Then, we employ two kinds of techniques, namely the selection-based technique and the decoding-based technique, to produce a best paraphrase T for S using the candidates acquired in the first stage. Experimental results show that: (1) The multi-pivot approach is effective for obtaining plenty of valuable candidate paraphrases. (2) Both the selection-based and decoding-based techniques can make good use of the candidates and produce high-quality paraphrases. Moreover, these two techniques are complementary. (3) The proposed method outperforms a state-of-the-art paraphrase generation approach.