Efficient Semantic Deduction and Approximate Matching over Compact Parse Forests

Semantic inference is often modeled as application of entailment rules, which specify generation of entailed sentences from a source sentence. Efficient generation and representation of entailed consequents is a fundamental problem common to such inference methods. We present a new data structure, termed compact forest, which allows efficient generation and representation of entailed consequents, each represented as a parse tree. Rule-based inference is complemented with a new approximate matching measure inspired by tree kernels, which is computed efficiently over compact forests. Our system also makes use of novel large-scale entailment rule bases, derived from Wikipedia as well as from information about predicates and their argument mapping, gathered from available lexicons and complemented by unsupervised learning.