Textual inference and paraphrase have attracted a significant amount of attention in recent years. Many NLP tasks, including question answering, information extraction, and text summarization, can be mapped at least partially onto the recognition of textual entailments and the detection of semantic equivalence between texts. Robust and accurate algorithms and resources for inference and paraphrasing can be beneficial for a broad range of NLP applications, and have stimulated research in the area of applied semantics over the last years.
The success of the Recognizing Textual Entailment challenges and the high participation in previous workshops on textual inference and paraphrases - Empirical Modeling of Semantic Equivalence and Entailment (ACL 2005), Textual Entailment and Paraphrasing (ACL/PASCAL 2007), and TextInfer 2009 (ACL) - show that there is substantial interest in the area among the research community.
TextInfer 2011 follows these workshops and aims to provide a common forum for researchers to discuss and compare novel ideas, models and tools for textual inference and paraphrasing. One particular goal is to broaden the workshop to invite both theoretical and applied research contributions on the joint topic of "inference." We aim to bring together empirical approaches, which have tended to dominate previous textual entailment events, with formal approaches to inference, which are more often presented at events like ICoS or IWCS. We feel that the time is ripe for researchers from both groups to join for this event, with the goal of establishing a discussion on how the two approaches relate to one another, and how to define interfaces between the two methodologies.
Proceeding Downloads
Evaluating answers to reading comprehension questions in context: results for German and the role of information structure
Reading comprehension activities are an authentic task including a rich, language-based context, which makes them an interesting real-life challenge for research into automatic content analysis. For textual entailment research, content assessment of ...
Towards a probabilistic model for lexical entailment
While modeling entailment at the lexical-level is a prominent task, addressed by most textual entailment systems, it has been approached mostly by heuristic methods, neglecting some of its important aspects. We present a probabilistic approach for this ...
Classification-based contextual preferences
This paper addresses context matching in textual inference. We formulate the task under the Contextual Preferences framework which broadly captures contextual aspects of inference. We propose a generic classification-based scheme under this framework ...
Is it worth submitting this run?: assess your RTE system with a good sparring partner
We address two issues related to the development of systems for Recognizing Textual Entailment. The first is the impossibility to capitalize on lessons learned over the different datasets available, due to the changing nature of traditional RTE ...
Diversity-aware evaluation for paraphrase patterns
Common evaluation metrics for paraphrase patterns do not necessarily correlate with extrinsic recognition task performance. We propose a metric which gives weight to lexical variety in paraphrase patterns; our proposed metric has a positive correlation ...
Representing and resolving ambiguities in ontology-based question answering
Ambiguities are ubiquitous in natural language and pose a major challenge for the automatic interpretation of natural language expressions. In this paper we focus on different types of lexical ambiguities that play a role in the context of ontology-...
Strings over intervals
Intervals and the events that occur in them are encoded as strings, elaborating on a conception of events as "intervals cum description." Notions of satisfaction in interval temporal logics are formulated in terms of strings, and the possibility of ...
Discovering commonsense entailment rules implicit in sentences
Reasoning about ordinary human situations and activities requires the availability of diverse types of knowledge, including expectations about the probable results of actions and the lexical entailments for many predicates. We describe initial work to ...
Index Terms
- Proceedings of the TextInfer 2011 Workshop on Textual Entailment