Paraphrase identification and semantic similarity in twitter with simple features

Paraphrase Identification and Semantic Similarity are two different yet well related tasks in NLP. There are many studies on these two tasks extensively on structured texts in the past. However, with the strong rise of social media data, studying these tasks on unstructured texts, particularly, social texts in Twitter is very interesting as it could be more complicated problems to deal with. We investigate and find a set of simple features which enables us to achieve very competitive performance on both tasks in Twitter data. Interestingly, we also confirm the significance of using word alignment techniques from evaluation metrics in machine translation in the overall performance of these tasks.