Using Bleu-like algorithms for the automatic recognition of entailment

Abstract

The BLEU algorithm has been used in many different fields. Another possible application is the automatic recognition of textual entailment. BLEU works at the lexical level, by comparing a candidate text with several reference texts in order to calculate how close the candidate text is to the references. In this case, the candidate is the text part of the entailment and the hypothesis is the unique reference. The algorithm achieves an accuracy of around 50%. Moreover, in this paper we explore the application of BLEU-like algorithms, finding that they can reach an accuracy of around 56%, which proves its possible use as a baseline for the task of recognizing entailment. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.