A preliminary evaluation of the impact of syntactic structure in semantic textual similarity and semantic relatedness tasks

The well related tasks of evaluating the Semantic Textual Similarity and Semantic Relatedness have been under a special attention in NLP community. Many different approaches have been proposed, implemented and evaluated at different levels, such as lexical similarity, word/string/POS tags overlapping, semantic modeling (LSA, LDA), etc. However, at the level of syntactic structure, it is not clear how significant it contributes to the overall accuracy. In this paper, we make a preliminary evaluation of the impact of the syntactic structure in the tasks by running and analyzing the results from several experiments regarding to how syntactic structure contributes to solving these tasks.