The way we say things to language models matters

What is it about?

Current AI methods for creating and identifying paraphrases (different ways of saying the same thing) mainly focus on overall similarity. However, this approach misses the subtle ways language can change. Our research introduces a new way to look at paraphrasing by considering specific types of language changes at particular points in the text. We created two new tasks: generating specific types of paraphrases and detecting these types. Our findings show that while AI is good at deciding if two sentences are paraphrases, it struggles with understanding the exact linguistic changes involved. Interestingly, training AI to work with these specific paraphrase types also improves its performance on other language tasks. We found that using larger AI models further enhances their ability to understand these nuanced language changes. We believe this new approach of focusing on paraphrase types could lead to significant improvements in how AI understands and works with language in the future.

Featured Image

Photo by Barbara Zandoval on Unsplash

Photo by Barbara Zandoval on Unsplash