Learning the Impact and Behavior of Syntactic Structure: A Case Study in Semantic Textual Similarity

We present a case study on the role of syn- tactic structures towards resolving the Se- mantic Textual Similarity (STS) task. Al- though various approaches have been pro- posed, the research of using syntactic in- formation to determine the semantic simi- larity is a relatively under-researched area. At the level of syntactic structure, it is not clear how significant the syntactic struc- ture contributes to the overall accuracy of the task. In this paper, we analyze the impact of syntactic structure towards the overall performance and its behavior in different score ranges of the STS seman- tic scale.