Methodologies of acquiring, recognizing, and generating paraphrases have been intensively studied in the last decade. In this talk, I will overview for a brief history and recent advances of automatic paraphrasing, linking their scope to a typology of paraphrases. Our typology, which defines the extention of so-called paraphrase from a linguistic viewpoint, enables researchers to focus a particular class and to select and exclude some classes according to the requirement from application. The issues on paraphrase research and those toward further understanding of paraphrases are also presented.