Textual entailment beyond semantic similarity information

Abstract

The variability of semantic expression is a special characteristic of natural language. This variability is challenging for many natural language processing applications that try to infer the same meaning from different text variants. In order to treat this problem a generic task has been proposed: Textual Entailment Recognition. In this paper, we present a new Textual Entailment approach based on Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and the cosine measure. This proposed approach extracts semantic knowledge from different corpora and resources. Our main purpose is to study how the acquired information can be combined with an already developed and tested Machine Learning Entailment system (MLEnt). The experiments show that the combination of MLEnt, LSI and cosine measure improves the results of the initial approach. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.