Discovery of Entailment Relations from Event Co-Occurrences

Lexical entailment is knowledge that may prove very useful for a variety of applications that deal with information implicit in a text. In this paper we address the problem of automatic discovery of pairs of verbs related by entailment. A specific challenge in this task is recognition of the direction of entailment in a pair. We model entailment by a number of linguistic cues as to local coherence between clauses. We first investigate the effect of these cues on the quality of the model and then evaluate it against human judgements. Our evaluation reveals that the model is capable of correctly identifying the direction in entailment-related pairs, although their separation from bidirectional pairs proves a more difficult task.

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