Automatic alignment of common information in comparable sentences of Portuguese

The ability to recognize distinct word sequences which refer to the same meaning is of extreme relevance for many applications in NLP, such as automatic summarization, question answering, generation, etc. In this paper we describe our first attempt at aligning common information between portuguese similar sentences. We propose a method based on lexical and syntatic information and some paraphrase rules to find different strings with the same meaning. A preliminary experiment suggests that the method has potential for identifying strings which are semantically related but lexically different, as is the case of lexical paraphrases.