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Kosmic: Korean Text Similarity Metric Reflecting Honorific Distinctions

Yerin Hwang, Yongil Kim, Hyunkyung Bae, Jeesoo Bang, Hwanhee Lee, Kyomin Jung

Abstract: Existing English-based text similarity measurements primarily focus on the semantic dimension, neglecting the unique linguistic attributes found in languages like Korean, where honorific expressions are explicitly integrated. To address this limitation, this study proposes Kosmic, a novel Korean text-similarity metric that encompasses the semantic and tonal facets of a given text pair. For the evaluation, we introduce a novel benchmark annotated by human experts, empirically showing that Kosmic outperforms the existing method. Moreover, by leveraging Kosmic, we assess various Korean paraphrasing methods to determine which techniques are most effective in preserving semantics and tone.