"Automatic extraction of paraphrasing rules: A survey and plans for future work" Prodromos Malakasiotis, Athens University of Economics and Business Abstract: People often need to restate their ideas in order to be more comprehensible. Moreover, human language provides so many ways to express oneself, that for the same event one could obtain several different descriptions. Therefore, the automatic construction of rules describing the meaning-preserving variations of natural language expressions, hereafter called paraphrasing rules, is of significant importance in many natural language applications, such as Question Answering, Natural Language Generation, etc. In the following, we attempt to describe the paraphrasing problem, its difficulties and the most important methods developed to deal with it, along with their advantages and disadvantages. Finally, we present our plans for future work.