Recognising Textual Entailment with Logical Inference

Abstract

We use logical inference techniques for recognising textual entailment. As the performance of theorem proving turns out to be highly dependent on not readily available background knowledge, we incorporate model building, a technique borrowed from automated reasoning, and show that it is a useful robust method to approximate entailment. Finally, we use machine learning to combine these deep semantic analysis techniques with simple shallow word overlap; the resulting hybrid model achieves high accuracy on the RTE testset, given the state of the art. Our results also show that the different techniques that we employ perform very differently on some of the subsets of the RTE corpus and as a result, it is useful to use the nature of the dataset as a feature.