Robust textual inference via graph matching

Abstract

We present a system for deciding whether a given sentence can be inferred from text. Each sentence is represented as a directed graph (extracted from a dependency parser) in which the nodes represent words or phrases, and the links represent syntactic and semantic relationships. We develop a learned graph matching approach to approximate entailment using the amount of the sentence's semantic content which is contained in the text. We present results on the Recognizing Textual Entailment dataset (Dagan et al., 2005), and show that our approach outperforms Bag-Of-Words and TF-IDFmodels. In addition, we explore common sources of errors in our approach and how to remedy them. © 2005 Association for Computational Linguistics.