Augmenting Paraphrase Generation with Syntax Information Using Graph Convolutional Networks

Paraphrase generation is an important yet challenging task in natural language processing. Neural network-based approaches have achieved remarkable success in sequence-to-sequence learning. Previous paraphrase generation work generally ignores syntactic information regardless of its availability, with the assumption that neural nets could learn such linguistic knowledge implicitly. In this work, we make an endeavor to probe into the efficacy of explicit syntactic information for the task of paraphrase generation. Syntactic information can appear in the form of dependency trees, which could be easily acquired from off-the-shelf syntactic parsers. Such tree structures could be conveniently encoded via graph convolutional networks to obtain more meaningful sentence representations, which could improve generated paraphrases. Through extensive experiments on four paraphrase datasets with different sizes and genres, we demonstrate the utility of syntactic information in neural paraphrase generation under the framework of sequence-to-sequence modeling. Specifically, our graph convolutional network-enhanced models consistently outperform their syntax-agnostic counterparts using multiple evaluation metrics.