“Ask Not What Textual Entailment Can Do for You...”

We challenge the NLP community to participate in a large-scale, distributed effort to design and build resources for developing and evaluating solutions to new and existing NLP tasks in the context of Recognizing Textual Entailment. We argue that the single global label with which RTE examples are annotated is insufficient to effectively evaluate RTE system performance; to promote research on smaller, related NLP tasks, we believe more detailed annotation and evaluation are needed, and that this effort will benefit not just RTE researchers, but the NLP community as a whole. We use insights from successful RTE systems to propose a model for identifying and annotating textual inference phenomena in textual entailment examples, and we present the results of a pilot annotation study that show this model is feasible and the results immediately useful.