Recognizing Textual Entailment Using Description Logic And Semantic Relatedness

Textual entailment (TE) is a relation that holds between two pieces of text where one reading the first piece can conclude that the second is most likely true. Accurate approaches for textual entailment can be beneficial to various natural language processing (NLP) applications such as: question answering, information extraction, summarization, and even machine translation. For this reason, research on textual entailment has attracted a significant amount of attention in recent years. A robust logical-based meaning representation of text is very hard to build, therefore the majority of textual entailment approaches rely on syntactic methods or shallow semantic alternatives. In addition, approaches that do use a logical-based meaning representation, require a large knowledge base of axioms and inference rules that are rarely available. The goal of this thesis is to design an efficient description logic based approach for recognizing textual entailment that uses semantic relatedness information as an alternative to large knowledge base of axioms and inference rules. In this thesis, we propose a description logic and semantic relatedness approach to textual entailment, where the type of semantic relatedness axioms employed in aligning the description logic representations are used as indicators of textual entailment. In our approach, the text and the hypothesis are first represented in description logic. The representations are enriched with additional semantic knowledge acquired by using the web as a corpus. The hypothesis is then merged into the text representation by learning semantic relatedness axioms on demand and a reasoner is then used to reason over the aligned representation. Finally, the types of axioms employed by the reasoner are used to learn if the text entails the hypothesis or not. To validate our approach we have implemented an RTE system named AORTE, and evaluated its performance on recognizing textual entailment using the fourth recognizing textual entailment challenge. Our approach achieved an accuracy of 68.8 on the two way task and 61.6 on the three way task which ranked the approach as 2nd when compared to the other participating runs in the same challenge. These results show that our description logical based approach can effectively be used to recognize textual entailment

A Statistical Approach with Syntactic and Semantic Features for Chinese Textual Entailment

[[abstract]]Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) is a PASCAL/TAC task in which two text fragments are processed by system to determine whether the meaning of hypothesis is entailed from another text or not. In this paper, we proposed a textual entailment system using a statistical approach that integrates syntactic and semantic techniques for Recognizing Inference in Text (RITE) using the NTCIR-9 RITE task and make a comparison between semantic and syntactic features based on their differences. We thoroughly evaluate our approach using subtasks of the NTCIR-9 RITE. As a result, our system achieved 73.28% accuracy on the Chinese Binary-Class (BC) subtask with NTCIR-9 RITE. Thorough experiments with the text fragments provided by the NTCIR-9 RITE task show that the proposed approach can significantly improve system accuracy.[[sponsorship]]IEEE[[incitationindex]]EI[[cooperationtype]]國外[[conferencetype]]國際[[conferencedate]]20120808~20120810[[booktype]]電子版[[iscallforpapers]]Y[[conferencelocation]]Vegas, Nevada, US

Chinese Textual Entailment with Wordnet Semantic and Dependency Syntactic Analysis

Chun Tu and Min-Yuh Day (2013), "Chinese Textual Entailment with Wordnet Semantic and Dependency Syntactic Analysis", 2013 IEEE International Workshop on Empirical Methods for Recognizing Inference in Text (IEEE EM-RITE 2013), August 14, 2013, in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration (IEEE IRI 2013), San Francisco, California, USA, August 14-16, 2013, pp. 69-74.[[abstract]]Recognizing Inference in TExt (RITE) is a task for automatically detecting entailment, paraphrase, and contradiction in texts which addressing major text understanding in information access research areas. In this paper, we proposed a Chinese textual entailment system using Wordnet semantic and dependency syntactic approaches in Recognizing Inference in Text (RITE) using the NTCIR-10 RITE-2 subtask datasets. Wordnet is used to recognize entailment at lexical level. Dependency syntactic approach is a tree edit distance algorithm applied on the dependency trees of both the text and the hypothesis. We thoroughly evaluate our approach using NTCIR-10 RITE-2 subtask datasets. As a result, our system achieved 73.28% on Traditional Chinese Binary-Class (BC) subtask and 74.57% on Simplified Chinese Binary-Class subtask with NTCIR-10 RITE-2 development datasets. Thorough experiments with the text fragments provided by the NTCIR-10 RITE-2 subtask showed that the proposed approach can improve system's overall accuracy.[[sponsorship]]IEEE[[incitationindex]]EI[[conferencetype]]國際[[conferencedate]]20130814~20130816[[booktype]]電子版[[iscallforpapers]]Y[[conferencelocation]]San Francisco, US

A Logic-based Approach for Recognizing Textual Entailment Supported by Ontological Background Knowledge

We present the architecture and the evaluation of a new system for recognizing textual entailment (RTE). In RTE we want to identify automatically the type of a logical relation between two input texts. In particular, we are interested in proving the existence of an entailment between them. We conceive our system as a modular environment allowing for a high-coverage syntactic and semantic text analysis combined with logical inference. For the syntactic and semantic analysis we combine a deep semantic analysis with a shallow one supported by statistical models in order to increase the quality and the accuracy of results. For RTE we use logical inference of first-order employing model-theoretic techniques and automated reasoning tools. The inference is supported with problem-relevant background knowledge extracted automatically and on demand from external sources like, e.g., WordNet, YAGO, and OpenCyc, or other, more experimental sources with, e.g., manually defined presupposition resolutions, or with axiomatized general and common sense knowledge. The results show that fine-grained and consistent knowledge coming from diverse sources is a necessary condition determining the correctness and traceability of results.Comment: 25 pages, 10 figure

A Survey of Paraphrasing and Textual Entailment Methods

Paraphrasing methods recognize, generate, or extract phrases, sentences, or longer natural language expressions that convey almost the same information. Textual entailment methods, on the other hand, recognize, generate, or extract pairs of natural language expressions, such that a human who reads (and trusts) the first element of a pair would most likely infer that the other element is also true. Paraphrasing can be seen as bidirectional textual entailment and methods from the two areas are often similar. Both kinds of methods are useful, at least in principle, in a wide range of natural language processing applications, including question answering, summarization, text generation, and machine translation. We summarize key ideas from the two areas by considering in turn recognition, generation, and extraction methods, also pointing to prominent articles and resources.Comment: Technical Report, Natural Language Processing Group, Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece, 201

Hypothesis Only Baselines in Natural Language Inference

We propose a hypothesis only baseline for diagnosing Natural Language Inference (NLI). Especially when an NLI dataset assumes inference is occurring based purely on the relationship between a context and a hypothesis, it follows that assessing entailment relations while ignoring the provided context is a degenerate solution. Yet, through experiments on ten distinct NLI datasets, we find that this approach, which we refer to as a hypothesis-only model, is able to significantly outperform a majority class baseline across a number of NLI datasets. Our analysis suggests that statistical irregularities may allow a model to perform NLI in some datasets beyond what should be achievable without access to the context.Comment: Accepted at *SEM 2018 as long paper. 12 page