dephrases

Dephrases is a term used in linguistics and natural language processing to describe a class of transformations that convert a sentence into a more concise form by removing certain phrases while preserving the core meaning. A dephrased sentence typically retains the main clause and essential referents, but drops nonessential descriptive material such as nonrestrictive modifiers, appositive phrases, and some prepositional phrases.

Origin and usage: The term dephrase has appeared in discussions of editing, summarization, and generation of synthetic text. It is not a single, formal standard, but a descriptive label for a family of operations that share the aim of brevity and clarity while attempting to maintain truth-conditions.

Techniques and types: Syntactic dephrasing removes nonessential modifiers and relative clauses; semantic dephrasing focuses on preserving core referents and propositions while deleting descriptive content; pragmatic dephrasing may adjust tone or emphasis by selecting shorter lexical choices. In computational settings, dephrasing often employs parsing, dependency analysis, and information-theoretic measures to identify low-value phrases.

Examples: The conference, held in Boston, attracted attendees. A dephrased version is: The conference attracted attendees. The tall man with a red hat walked quickly. A dephrased form might be: The man walked.

Applications and limitations: Dephrasing is used in editing, readability improvements, and automated summarization. It can aid concise communication and data processing, but it risks losing important qualifiers or disambiguating details. Care is required in legal, technical, or safety-critical texts.

See also: paraphrase, summarization, editing, natural language generation.