Does anyone know of any resources? I would be mainly interested in software, and found one, at the Hokkaido University website, but this seems to be under development, and no one can say whether or not they are going to release any of it. It is called PriestGUI and Blumen. I also found a .pl package, but can't seem to work out, how it works. So for software I am looking for something pre-made, that I just have to install.

I am also looking for more general learning resources, because I think that this is a very important skill. Maybe someone knows good websites or books. Since I plan to place a bigger order this would be a good chance. So, if you know of any good resources, please let me know.

I've never heard of paraphrasing software before. Is it something that is commonly used? I didn't think we have the technology to do it effectively yet. Just look at how bad internet translation software still is.

Very, very unlikely. The technology to do this just isn't there, and I doubt there is much demand. Look how much demand there is for digital translators, yet the technology is still fairly awful.

partner55083777 Wrote:I've never heard of paraphrasing software before. Is it something that is commonly used? I didn't think we have the technology to do it effectively yet. Just look at how bad internet translation software still is.

Such software does indeed exist, here is an example, from the 青山学院 - said PriestGUI software.

http://www-haradalb.it.aoyama.ac.jp/imag...result.jpg

Priest and Blumen is not available outside the department of linguistics. And the available software I found was not running properly on my Notebook.

I do agree that translation software is not good, and is improving rather slowly, as far as the free-to-use translators show. Without extensive crowd contribution it will not become any better.

prink Wrote:Very, very unlikely. The technology to do this just isn't there, and I doubt there is much demand. Look how much demand there is for digital translators, yet the technology is still fairly awful.

According to various academic and non-academic sources, there is a demand for such software. Not only in recent years but since around the 1990's this has been a hot topic. Reading websites such as 優しい日本語 it becomes clear, why even being able to rephrase sentences is important as a general skill. An example they provided had to do with earthquakes. There was a short news article for Japanese readers, full of Kanji and terms Japanese would know, but foreigners would not. In a desaster situation there is no time to explain everything twice until someone understands who is not so familiar with the language.

Accordingly the article was rephrased. It was less grammar heavy, and it didn't contain many Kanji, so even a foreigner should be able to understand. This article in the orginal had ~5 lines, the other had too, but the second was missing some important points. For instance the warning that it would be dangerous to enter this house, because the walls have cracks, and the building could collaps.

All in all the .pdf contained 35 examples for rephrasing sentences, how to paraphrase adjectives to verbs based on their syntactic and semantic properties, and so on. So nothing I could learn from that would be in any way useful. This is why I was asking for general resources to learn the basics, and not only software that does it automatically.