Using Discourse Commitments to Recognize Textual Entailment

In this paper, we introduce a new framework for recognizing textual entailment (RTE) which depends on extraction of the set of publicly-held beliefs – known as discourse commitments – that can be ascribed to the author of a text (t) or a hypothesis (h). We show that once a set of commitments have been extracted from a t-h pair, the task of recognizing textual entailment is reduced to the identification of the commitments from a t which support the inference of the h. Our system correctly identified entailment relationships in more than 80% of t-h pairs taken from all three of the previous PASCAL RTE Challenges, without the need for additional sources of training data.