Word Senses, Semantic Roles and Entailment

We describe an approach to classifying word senses and semantic roles that focuses on the entailments that can be drawn from sentences. A key observation is that entailments arise from sentences, not word senses, and by taking a compositional approach to deriving entailments, we can significantly simplify the number of senses that are required. In addition, we argue that most uses of semantic roles can be replaced by taking prepositional meaning seriously, resulting in a strongly compositional approach to computing sentence meaning.