Entailment above the word level in distributional semantics

  • Authors:
  • Marco Baroni;Raffaella Bernardi;Ngoc-Quynh Do;Chung-chieh Shan

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Trento;University of Trento;Free University of Bozen-Bolzano;Cornell University University of Tsukuba

  • Venue:
  • EACL '12 Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
  • Year:
  • 2012

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

We introduce two ways to detect entailment using distributional semantic representations of phrases. Our first experiment shows that the entailment relation between adjective-noun constructions and their head nouns (big cat|= cat), once represented as semantic vector pairs, generalizes to lexical entailment among nouns (dog|= animal). Our second experiment shows that a classifier fed semantic vector pairs can similarly generalize the entailment relation among quantifier phrases (many dogs|= some dogs) to entailment involving unseen quantifiers (all cats|= several cats). Moreover, nominal and quantifier phrase entailment appears to be cued by different distributional correlates, as predicted by the type-based view of entailment in formal semantics.