Textual entailment

Textual entailment (TE), also known as Natural Language Inference (NLI), in natural language processing is a directional relation between text fragments. The relation holds whenever the truth of one text fragment follows from another text. In the TE framework, the entailing and entailed texts are termed text (t) and hypothesis (h), respectively. Textual entailment is not the same as pure logical entailment – it has a more relaxed definition: "t entails h" (t ⇒ h) if, typically, a human reading t would infer that h is most likely true.[1] (Alternatively: t ⇒ h if and only if, typically, a human reading t would be justified in inferring the proposition expressed by h from the proposition expressed by t.[2]) The relation is directional because even if "t entails h", the reverse "h entails t" is much less certain.[3][4] Determining whether this relationship holds is an informal task, one which sometimes overlaps with the formal tasks of formal semantics (satisfying a strict condition will usually imply satisfaction of a less strict conditioned); additionally, textual entailment partially subsumes word entailment.

## Contents

* 1 Examples
* 2 Ambiguity of natural language
* 3 Approaches
* 4 Applications
* 5 Natural Language Inference Datasets
* 6 See also
* 7 References
* 8 Bibliography
* 9 External links

## Examples

Textual entailment can be illustrated with examples of three different relations:[5]

An example of a positive TE (text entails hypothesis) is:

* text: If you help the needy, God will reward you.

hypothesis: Giving money to a poor man has good consequences.

An example of a negative TE (text contradicts hypothesis) is:

* text: If you help the needy, God will reward you.

hypothesis: Giving money to a poor man has no consequences.

An example of a non-TE (text does not entail nor contradict) is:

* text: If you help the needy, God will reward you.

hypothesis: Giving money to a poor man will make you a better person.

## Ambiguity of natural language

A characteristic of natural language is that there are many different ways to state what one wants to say: several meanings can be contained in a single text and the same meaning can be expressed by different texts. This variability of semantic expression can be seen as the dual problem of language ambiguity. Together, they result in a many-to-many mapping between language expressions and meanings. The task of paraphrasing involves recognizing when two texts have the same meaning and creating a similar or shorter text that conveys almost the same information. Textual entailment is similar[6] but weakens the relationship to be unidirectional. Mathematical solutions to establish textual entailment can be based on the directional property of this relation, by making a comparison between some directional similarities of the texts involved.[4]

## Approaches

Textual entailment measures natural language understanding as it asks for a semantic interpretation of the text, and due to its generality remains an active area of research. Many approaches and refinements of approaches have been considered, such as word embedding, logical models, graphical models, rule systems, contextual focusing, and machine learning.[6] Practical or large-scale solutions avoid these complex methods and instead use only surface syntax or lexical relationships, but are correspondingly less accurate.[3] However, even state-of-the-art systems are still far from human performance; a study found humans to be in agreement on the dataset 95.25% of the time,[7] while algorithms from 2016 had not yet achieved 90%.[8]

## Applications

Many natural language processing applications, like question answering, information extraction, summarization, multi-document summarization, and evaluation of machine translation systems, need to recognize that a particular target meaning can be inferred from different text variants. Typically entailment is used as part of a larger system, for example in a prediction system to filter out trivial or obvious predictions.[9] Textual entailment also has applications in adversarial stylometry, which has the objective of removing textual style without changing the overall meaning of communication.[10]

## Natural Language Inference Datasets

Some of available English NLI datasets include:

* SNLI[11]
* MultiNLI[12]
* SciTail[13]
* SICK[14]
* MedNLI[15]
* QA-NLI[16]

In addition, there are several non-English NLI datasets, as follows:

* XNLI[17]
* FarsTail[18]
* OCNLI[19]
* SICK-NL[20]
* IndoNLI[21]

## See also

* Entailment (linguistics)
* Inference engine
* Semantic reasoner
* Fuzzy logic

## References

1. ↑ Ido Dagan, Oren Glickman and Bernardo Magnini. The PASCAL Recognising Textual Entailment Challenge, p. 2 in: Quiñonero-Candela, J.; Dagan, I.; Magnini, B.; d'Alché-Buc, F. (Eds.) Machine Learning Challenges. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 3944, pp. 177–190, Springer, 2006.
2. ↑ Korman, Daniel Z.; Mack, Eric; Jett, Jacob; Renear, Allen H. (2018-03-09). "Defining textual entailment" (in en). Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 69 (6): 763–772. doi:10.1002/asi.24007. ISSN 2330-1635. https://philpapers.org/rec/KORDTE.
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Dagan, I. and O. Glickman. 'Probabilistic textual entailment: Generic applied modeling of language variability' in: PASCAL Workshop on Learning Methods for Text Understanding and Mining (2004) Grenoble.
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Tătar, D. e.a. Textual Entailment as a Directional Relation
5. ↑ Textual Entailment Portal on the Association for Computational Linguistics wiki
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Androutsopoulos, Ion; Malakasiotis, Prodromos (2010). "A Survey of Paraphrasing and Textual Entailment Methods". Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 38: 135–187. doi:10.1613/jair.2985. https://www.jair.org/media/2985/live-2985-5001-jair.pdf. Retrieved 13 February 2017.
7. ↑ Bos, Johan; Markert, Katja (1 January 2005). "Recognising Textual Entailment with Logical Inference". Proceedings of the Conference on Human Language Technology and Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: 628–635. doi:10.3115/1220575.1220654. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9757/a78f70b9a2e5975ebec01e9452c1caf75739.pdf. Retrieved 13 February 2017.
8. ↑ Zhao, Kai; Huang, Liang; Ma, Mingbo (4 January 2017). "Textual Entailment with Structured Attentions and Composition". arXiv:1701.01126 [cs.CL].
9. ↑ Shani, Ayelett (25 October 2013). "How Dr. Kira Radinsky Used Algorithms to Predict Riots in Egypt" (in en). Haaretz. http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.554263. Retrieved 13 February 2017.
10. ↑ Potthast, Hagen & Stein 2016, p. 11-12.
11. ↑ Bowman, Samuel R.; Angeli, Gabor; Potts, Christopher; Manning, Christopher D. (2015). "A large annotated corpus for learning natural language inference". Association for Computational Linguistics. 632–642. doi:10.18653/v1/D15-1075. http://nlp.stanford.edu/pubs/snli_paper.pdf.
12. ↑ Williams, Adina; Nangia, Nikita; Bowman, Samuel R. (2018). "A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference". Association for Computational Linguistics. 1112–1122. doi:10.18653/v1/N18-1101. https://aclanthology.org/N18-1101.pdf.
13. ↑ Khot, Tushar; Sabharwal, Ashish; Clark, Peter (2018). "SciTaiL: A Textual Entailment Dataset from Science Question Answering". 32. doi:10.1609/aaai.v32i1.12022. https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/12022/11881.
14. ↑ Marelli, Marco; Bentivogli, Luisa; Baroni, Marco; Bernardi, Raffaella; Menini, Stefano; Zamparelli, Roberto (2014). "SemEval-2014 Task 1: Evaluation of Compositional Distributional Semantic Models on Full Sentences through Semantic Relatedness and Textual Entailment". Dublin, Ireland: Association for Computational Linguistics. 1–8. doi:10.3115/v1/S14-2001. https://aclanthology.org/S14-2001.pdf.
15. ↑ Romanov, Alexey; Shivade, Chaitanya (2018). "Lessons from Natural Language Inference in the Clinical Domain". Brussels, Belgium: Association for Computational Linguistics. 1586–1596. doi:10.18653/v1/D18-1187. http://aclanthology.lst.uni-saarland.de/D18-1187.pdf.
16. ↑ Demszky, Dorottya; Guu, Kelvin; Liang, Percy (2018). "Transforming Question Answering Datasets Into Natural Language Inference Datasets". arXiv:1809.02922 [cs.CL].
17. ↑ Conneau, Alexis; Rinott, Ruty; Lample, Guillaume; Williams, Adina; Bowman, Samuel R.; Schwenk, Holger; Stoyanov, Veselin (2018). "XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representations". Brussels, Belgium: Association for Computational Linguistics. 2475–2485. doi:10.18653/v1/D18-1269. https://aclanthology.org/D18-1269.pdf.
18. ↑ Amirkhani, Hossein; AzariJafari, Mohammad; Pourjafari, Zohreh; Faridan-Jahromi, Soroush; Kouhkan, Zeinab; Amirak, Azadeh (2020). "FarsTail: A Persian Natural Language Inference Dataset". arXiv:2009.08820 [cs.CL].
19. ↑ Hu, Hai; Richardson, Kyle; Xu, Liang; Li, Lu; Kübler, Sandra; Moss, Lawrence (2020). "OCNLI: Original Chinese Natural Language Inference". 3512–3526. doi:10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.314. https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.314.pdf.
20. ↑ Wijnholds, Gijs; Moortgat, Michael (2021). "SICK-NL: A Dataset for Dutch Natural Language Inference". Association for Computational Linguistics. 1474–1479. doi:10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.126. https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.126.pdf.
21. ↑ Mahendra, Rahmad; Aji, Alham Fikri; Louvan, Samuel; Rahman, Fahrurrozi; Vania, Clara (2021). "IndoNLI: A Natural Language Inference Dataset for Indonesian". Association for Computational Linguistics. 10511–10527. doi:10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.821. https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.821.pdf.

## Bibliography

* Potthast, Martin; Hagen, Matthias; Stein, Benno (2016). "Author Obfuscation: Attacking the State of the Art in Authorship Verification". Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1609/16090716.pdf.

## External links

* Textual Entailment Resource Pool

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Natural language processing

General terms|

* Natural language understanding
* Text corpus
* Speech corpus
* Stopwords
* Bag-of-words
* AI-complete
* n-gram (Bigram, Trigram)

Text analysis|

* Text segmentation
* Part-of-speech tagging
* Text chunking
* Compound term processing
* Collocation extraction
* Stemming
* Lemmatisation
* Named-entity recognition
* Coreference resolution
* Sentiment analysis
* Concept mining
* Parsing
* Word-sense disambiguation
* Ontology learning
* Terminology extraction
* Textual entailment
* Truecasing

Automatic summarization|

* Multi-document summarization
* Sentence extraction
* Text simplification

Machine translation|

* Computer-assisted
* Example-based
* Rule-based
* Neural

Automatic identification
and data capture|

* Speech recognition
* Speech synthesis
* Optical character recognition
* Natural language generation

Topic model|

* Pachinko allocation
* Latent Dirichlet allocation
* Latent semantic analysis

Computer-assisted
reviewing|

* Automated essay scoring
* Concordancer
* Grammar checker
* Predictive text
* Spell checker
* Syntax guessing

Natural language
user interface|

* Automated online assistant
* Chatbot
* Interactive fiction
* Question answering
* Voice user interface

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