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<Paper uid="J83-1001">
  <Title>Paraphrasing Questions Using Given and New Information 1</Title>
  <Section position="12" start_page="4" end_page="4" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
9. Conclusions
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The paraphraser described here is a syntactic one.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> While this work has examined the reasons for different forms of expression, additions must be made in the area of semantics. The substitution of synonyms, phrases, or idioms for portions or all of the question requires an examination of the effect of context on word meaning and of the intentions of the speaker on word or phrase choice. The lack of a rich semantic base and contextual information dictated the syntactic approach used here, but the paraphraser can be extended once a wider range of information becomes available.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> When testing the implementation of the CO-OP system and extending its linguistic coverage, the paraphraser proved particularly helpful in debugging incorrect parses. It provided fast, easy-to-recognize notification when an incorrect interpretation had been made. This leads us to believe that the paraphrase would also prove helpful to actual users of the system were CO-OP to interpret a question differently than it was intended. Testing of this facility with a large number of actual users remains a topic for future work.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The CO-OP paraphraser has been designed to be domain-independent, and thus a change of the data base requires no change in the paraphraser. Paraphra-American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 9, Number 1, January-March 1983 9 Kathleen R. McKeown Paraphrasing Questions Using Given and New Information sers that use the template form, however, will require such changes. This is because the templates or patterns, which constitute the type of question that can be asked, are necessarily dependent on the domain.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Different sets of templates must be used for different data bases.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> The CO-OP paraphraser also differs from other systems in that it generates the question using a transformation grammar of questions. It addresses two specific problems involved in generating paraphrases: 1. ambiguity in determining which noun phrases a relative clause modifies; 2. the production of a question that differs from the user's.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> These goals have been achieved for questions using relative clauses through the application of a theory of given and new information to the generation process.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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