Proceedings of the TextInfer 2011 Workshop on Textual Entailment

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.