Automatic generation of large-scale paraphrases

Research on paraphrase has mostly focussed on lexical or syntactic variation within individual sentences. Our concern is with larger-scale paraphrases, from multiple sentences or paragraphs to entire documents. In this paper we address the problem of generating paraphrases of large chunks of texts. We ground our discussion through a worked example of extending an existing NLG system to accept as input a source text, and to generate a range of fluent semantically-equivalent alternatives, varying not only at the lexical and syntactic levels, but also in document structure and layout