Recognizing Partial Textual Entailment

Textual entailment is an asymmetric relation between two text fragments that describes whether one fragment can be inferred from the other. It thus cannot capture the notion that the target fragment is “almost entailed” by the given text. The recently suggested idea of partial textual entailment may remedy this problem. We investigate partial entailment under the faceted entailment model and the possibility of adapting existing textual entailment methods to this setting. Indeed, our results show that these methods are useful for recognizing partial entailment. We also provide a preliminary assessment of how partial entailment may be used for recognizing (complete) textual entailment.