NTNU: Measuring Semantic Similarity with Sublexical Feature Representations and Soft Cardinality

The paper describes the approaches taken by the NTNU team to the SemEval 2014 Semantic Textual Similarity shared task. The solutions combine measures based on lexical soft cardinality and character n-gram feature representations with lexical distance metrics from TakeLab’s baseline system. The final NTNU system is based on bagged support vector machine regression over the datasets from previous shared tasks and shows highly competitive performance, being the best system on three of the datasets and third best overall (on weighted mean over all six datasets).