Paraphrase Identification (PI) problem is to classify that whether or not two sentences are close enough in meaning to be termed as paraphrases. PI is an important research dimension with practical applications in Information Extraction (IE), Machine Translation, Information Retrieval, Automatic Identification of Copyright Infringement, Question Answering Systems and Intelligent Tutoring Systems, to name a few. This study presents a novel approach of paraphrase identification using semantic heuristic features envisaging improving the accuracy compared to state-of-the-art PI systems. Finally, a comprehensive critical analysis of misclassifications is carried out to provide insightful evidence about the proposed approach and the corpora used in the experiments.