FBK-HLT: An Effective System for Paraphrase Identification and Semantic Similarity in Twitter

This paper reports the description and performance of our system, FBK-HLT, participating in the SemEval 2015, Task #1 "Paraphrase and Semantic Similarity in Twitter", for both subtasks. We submitted two runs with different classifiers in combining typical features (lexical similarity, string similarity, word n-grams, etc) with machine translation metrics and edit distance features. We outperform the baseline system and achieve a very competitive result to the best system on the first subtask. Eventually, we are ranked 4th out of 18 teams participating in subtask "Paraphrase Identification".