The Text Analysis Conference (TAC) 2009 competition featured a new textual entailment search task, which extends the 2008 textual entailment task. The goal is to find information in a set of documents that are entailed from a given statement. Rather than designing a system specifically for this task, we investigated the adaptation of an existing artificial believer system to solve this task. Th...

Blogs and forums are widely adopted by online communities to debate about various issues. However, a user that wants to cut in on a debate may experience some difficulties in extracting the current accepted positions, and can be discouraged from interacting through these applications. In our paper, we combine textual entailment with argumentation theory to automatically extract the arguments fr...

AT&T participated in two tasks at TRECVID 2010: contentbased copy detection (CCD) and instance-based search (INS). The CCD system developed for TRECVID 2009 was enhanced for efficiency and scale and was augmented by audio features [1]. As a pilot task, participation in INS was meant to evaluate a number of algorithms traditionally used for search in a fully automated setting. In this paper, we ...

We present two regression models for the prediction of pairwise preference judgments among MT hypotheses. Both models are based on feature sets that are motivated by textual entailment and incorporate lexical similarity as well as local syntactic features and specific semantic phenomena. One model predicts absolute scores; the other one direct pairwise judgments. We find that both models are co...

The Recognizing Textual Entailment System shown here is based on the use of a broad-coverage parser to extract dependency relationships; in addition, WordNet relations are used to recognize entailment at the lexical level. The work investigates whether the mapping of dependency trees from text and hypothesis give better evidence of entailment than the matching of plain text alone. While the use...

While a significant amount of research has been devoted to textual entailment, automated entailment from conversational scripts has received less attention. To address this limitation, this paper investigates the problem of conversation entailment: automated inference of hypotheses from conversation scripts. We examine two levels of semantic representations: a basic representation based on synt...

This paper presents how text summarization can be influenced by textual entailment. We show that if we use textual entailment recognition together with text summarization approach, we achieve good results for final summaries, obtaining an improvement of 6.78% with respect to the summarization approach only. We also compare the performance of this combined approach to two baselines (the one prov...

This paper addresses syntax-based paraphrasing methods for Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE). In particular, we describe a dependency-based paraphrasing algorithm, using the DIRT data set, and its application in the context of a straightforward RTE system based on aligning dependency trees. We find a small positive effect of dependency-based paraphrasing on both the RTE3 development and test...

Work on the semantics of questions has argued that the relation between a question and its answer(s) can be cast in terms of logical entailment. In this paper, we demonstrate how computational systems designed to recognize textual entailment can be used to enhance the accuracy of current open-domain automatic question answering (Q/A) systems. In our experiments, we show that when textual entail...