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Thomas Wasow (Stanford University) Host: Etzioni Selecting Among Paraphrases Turing Center Distinguished Lecture Series Friday, November 4, 2005 3:30 pm, Mary Gates Hall 241 Abstract What makes speakers choose one way of expressing a thought over other equivalent ways? I have been investigating this question through corpus studies, supplemented occasionally with laboratory experiments. My work on this question has involved four alternations in English: Heavy NP Shift (e.g. "That brings a funny story to mind" ~ "That brings to mind a funny story") the Verb-Particle construction (e.g. "I lifted up the cup" ~ "I lifted the cup up") the Dative Alternation (e.g. "We handed a toy to the baby" ~ "We handed the baby a toy") Relativizer optionality (e.g. "I read a book that she wrote" ~ "I read a book she wrote") Much past work on this subject has sought to explain the choices made in such cases in terms of parsing preferences. I argue for a more speaker-oriented view, concluding with several general production strategies that evidently play a role in selecting among paraphrases.

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