NLP library for determining if a sentence is equivalent to another sentence?
javascript, nlp, php, python
Solution
What you are describing is the task of "paraphrase" (or bidirectional "textual entailment"). This is an extremely hard problem and an open research area. I doubt that there is a system available that would do well enough on this task for real-world, general use.
If you have a very narrow set of transformations in mind (such as the "would you like" <-> "do you want" alternation), you could try and construct a set of transformation rules that convert one sentence to the other. These rules could act directly on the sentence or on a parse tree produced from a statistical parser.
Problem
I would like to find an NLP library in Python, PHP or even JavaScript for determining whether a sentence in a string is equivalent to a differently structured sentence? For example, the library would need to be able to determine whether these two sentences are equivalent: "Would you like the order for here or to go?" "Do you want the order for here or to go?" Is there such a thing? Or would it actually be easier for me to build something like this myself for the specific application I need it for?