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

Ask, and shall you receive?: Understanding Desire Fulfillment in Natural Language Text

The ability to comprehend wishes or desires and their fulfillment is important to Natural Language Understanding. This paper introduces the task of identifying if a desire expressed by a subject in a given short piece of text was fulfilled. We propose various unstructured and structured models that capture fulfillment cues such as the subject's emotional state and actions. Our experiments with two different datasets demonstrate the importance of understanding the narrative and discourse structure to address this task

Techniques for recognizing textual entailment and semantic equivalence

After defining what is understood by textual entailment and semantic equivalence, the present state and the desirable future of the systems aimed at recognizing them is shown. A compilation of the currently implemented techniques in the main Recognizing Textual Entailment and Semantic Equivalence systems is given

Learning to Identify Ambiguous and Misleading News Headlines

Accuracy is one of the basic principles of journalism. However, it is increasingly hard to manage due to the diversity of news media. Some editors of online news tend to use catchy headlines which trick readers into clicking. These headlines are either ambiguous or misleading, degrading the reading experience of the audience. Thus, identifying inaccurate news headlines is a task worth studying. Previous work names these headlines "clickbaits" and mainly focus on the features extracted from the headlines, which limits the performance since the consistency between headlines and news bodies is underappreciated. In this paper, we clearly redefine the problem and identify ambiguous and misleading headlines separately. We utilize class sequential rules to exploit structure information when detecting ambiguous headlines. For the identification of misleading headlines, we extract features based on the congruence between headlines and bodies. To make use of the large unlabeled data set, we apply a co-training method and gain an increase in performance. The experiment results show the effectiveness of our methods. Then we use our classifiers to detect inaccurate headlines crawled from different sources and conduct a data analysis.Comment: Accepted by IJCAI 201

Context Aware Textual Entailment

In conversations, stories, news reporting, and other forms of natural language, understanding requires participants to make assumptions (hypothesis) based on background knowledge, a process called entailment. These assumptions may then be supported, contradicted, or refined as a conversation or story progresses and additional facts become known and context changes. It is often the case that we do not know an aspect of the story with certainty but rather believe it to be the case; i.e., what we know is associated with uncertainty or ambiguity. In this research a method has been developed to identify different contexts of the input raw text along with specific features of the contexts such as time, location, and objects. The method includes a two-phase SVM classifier along with a voting mechanism in the second phase to identify the contexts. Rule-based algorithms were utilized to extract the context elements. This research also develops a new context˗aware text representation. This representation maintains semantic aspects of sentences, as well as textual contexts and context elements. The method can offer both graph representation and First-Order-Logic representation of the text. This research also extracts a First-Order Logic (FOL) and XML representation of a text or series of texts. The method includes entailment using background knowledge from sources (VerbOcean and WordNet), with resolution of conflicts between extracted clauses, and handling the role of context in resolving uncertain truth

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