---
title: "Mutaphrase: Paraphrasing with FrameNet — Ellsworth 2007"
description: "Statistical NLP systems benefit from more training data."
authors: ["Michael Ellsworth", "Adam Janin"]
year: 2007
venue: "Proceedings of the ACL-PASCAL Workshop on Textual Entailment and Paraphrasing"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/W07-1424/"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/ellsworth-2007-mutaphrase-paraphrasing-framenet/"
---
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# Mutaphrase: Paraphrasing with FrameNet

**Authors:** [Michael Ellsworth](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/michael-ellsworth/), Adam Janin · **Year:** 2007 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the ACL-PASCAL Workshop on Textual Entailment and Paraphrasing · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W07-1424/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W07-1424.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7097008957)

**Citations:** 0 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [14](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Statistical NLP systems benefit from more training data. One way to get it is to restate existing sentences so the meaning stays similar while the wording and word order change. Most earlier paraphrase generators learned rewrites from corpora of known paraphrase pairs. Mutaphrase is a preliminary system that instead builds paraphrases algorithmically from FrameNet, a hand-annotated lexico-semantic database that maps meaning to form. The input is a sentence with FrameNet annotation, currently done by hand. The system turns it into a syntactico-semantic tree and automatically extracts ordered valences, i.e. patterns of frame elements with phrase types and grammatical functions. It then recursively rewrites each frame node using alternative valences from the same lexical unit, from other units of the same frame, or from related frames. The output is a very large set of candidates that vary in both syntactic and semantic distance from the input. These are ranked only by how often each valence occurs in FrameNet, so some results are semantically odd. The approach matters because it offers controllable data expansion for language modeling, MT and generation without parallel paraphrase corpora.

## Key points
- For "I like eating cheese", the system produced 8403 paraphrases. The top-ranked one, "I resented drinking cheese", shows the problem of semantic mismatch. "Nausea seems a commonplace symptom" produced 502 paraphrases.
- Each annotated LU typically has 2–10 valence patterns. These cover active/passive, the dative alternation and optional elements. Multiword LUs such as take off.v are also handled; its two orderings occur 57/68 and 7/68 times.
- Long sentences can yield 10,000+ paraphrases but use a great deal of time and memory. The authors suggest earlier pruning as a fix.
- Current limitations:
  - The input requires manual FrameNet annotation.
  - Conjunctions and relative clauses are poorly supported.
  - Nonsensical outputs such as sipping meat are not filtered.
- Planned work includes:
  - automatic semantic parsing (e.g. Shalmaneser);
  - WordNet-based similarity filtering and synonym expansion;
  - scoring by syntactic edit distance and language models;
  - multilingual paraphrasing via FrameNet-like resources such as SALSA.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/shelves/linguistics/) · [Machine translation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/shelves/machine-translation/)

Topics: [Semantic role labeling](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/topics/semantic-role-labeling/)

## Cited by

Cited by

14 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 1 of them have a page here, 13 not yet.

- [FrameNet+: Fast Paraphrastic Tripling of FrameNet](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/pavlick-2015-framenet-fast-paraphrastic-tripling-framenet/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{ellsworth2007mutaphrase,
  title = {{Mutaphrase: Paraphrasing with FrameNet}},
  author = {Ellsworth, Michael and Janin, Adam},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACL-PASCAL Workshop on Textual Entailment and Paraphrasing},
  year = {2007},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W07-1424/}
}
```

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## References

27 references, 8 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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