An inference model for semantic entailment in natural language

Abstract

Semantic entailment is the problem of determining if the meaning of a given sentence entails that of another. This is a fundamental problem in natural language understanding that provides a broad framework for studying language variability and has a large number of applications. We present a principled approach to this problem that builds on inducing re-representations of text snippets into a hierarchical knowledge representation along with a sound inferential mechanism that makes use of it to prove semantic entailment.