This paper provides a brief description of the system for recognizing textual entailment (RTE) Language Computer Corporation (LCC) used in the 2008 TAC RTE-4 Evaluation. Our RTE-4 work follows our previous work (Hickl and Bensley, 2007; Bensley and Hickl, 2008; Hickl, 2008) in using a pipeline of lightweight, largely statistical systems for commitment extraction, lexical alignment, and entailme...

This paper covers the recognition of textual entailment by means of different approaches based on lexical similarities and syntactic trees. These approaches are easily portable to other languages. We present the achieved results for each individual approach and we propose a simple voting strategy between these approaches and our previous system (presented in Second PASCAL Recognising Textual En...

Systems designed to recognize textual entailment typically employ both syntax and semantics. Our goal in this paper is to explore the degree to which semantics alone can be used to accurately detect entailment so that we can gain a better understanding of this single component within an entailment system. This paper reports the knowledge-bases considered and selected for person names, locations...

In the logic approach to Recognizing Textual Entailment, identifying phrase-tophrase semantic relations is still an unsolved problem. Resources such as the Paraphrase Database offer limited coverage despite their large size whereas unsupervised distributional models of meaning often fail to recognize phrasal entailments. We propose to map phrases to their visual denotations and compare their me...

This paper describes the input specification language of the WAG Sentence Generation system. The input is described in terms of Halliday’s (1978) three meaning components, ideational meaning (the propositional content to be expressed), interactional meaning (what the speaker intends the listener to do in making the utterance), and textual meaning (how the content is structured as a message, in ...

One particular information can be conveyed by many different sentences. This variety concerns the choice of vocabulary and style as well as the level of detail (from laconism or succinctness to total verbosity). Although verbosity in written texts is considered bad style, generated verbosity can help natural language processing (NLP) systems to fill in the implicit knowledge. The paper presents...

This paper describes our work to allow players in a virtual world to pose questions without relying on textual input. Our approach is to create enhanced virtual photographs by annotating them with semantic information from the 3D environment’s scene graph. The player can then use these annotated photos to interact with inhabitants of the world through automatically generated queries that are gu...

Computers and technologies are becoming an integral and important part of lives for most people, including those with disabilities. Improving and enhancing text entry and interaction with computers for disabled users has been investigated for many years, with many systems and interface devices proposed to facilitate and simplify text input process. This paper describes how we improve textual in...