Recognising Entailment within Discourse

摘要

Texts are commonly interpreted based on the entire discourse in which they are situated. Discourse processing has been shown useful for inference-based application; yet, most systems for textual entailment – a generic paradigm for applied inference – have only addressed discourse considerations via off-the-shelf coreference resolvers. In this paper we explore various discourse aspects in entailment inference, suggest initial solutions for them and investigate their impact on entailment performance. Our experiments suggest that discourse provides useful information, which significantly improves entailment inference, and should be better addressed by future entailment systems.