Linguistic Entailment Recognition (LER) Task

A Linguistic Entailment Recognition (LER) Task is an entailment assessment task (that recognizes whether a hypothesis) that restricts itself to assessing linguistic expressions.

• Context:
  • It can range from being a Textual Entailment Recognition Task to being a Spoken Entailment Recognition Task.
• Example(s):
  • LER("My cat is black”, “I have a black cat”) ⇒ True.
  • LER("I have a black cat”, “My cat is black”) ⇒ True.
  • LER("The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed up 255 points to brake its record high”, “Dow ends up”) ⇒ True.
  • LER("Dow ends up”, “The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed up 255 points to brake its record high”) ⇒ False.
  • LER("The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed up 255 points to brake its record high”, “Dow gains 255 points”) ⇒ True.
  • LER("The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed up 255 points to brake its record high”, “Stock market hits record high”) ⇒ True.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • a Linguistic Expression Paraphrasing Task.
• See: Pragmatics, NLP Task.

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References

2009

• (Wikipedia, 2009) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entailment_(pragmatics)
  • In pragmatics (linguistics), entailment is the relationship between two sentences where the truth of one (A) requires the truth of the other (B).
  • For example, the sentence (A) The president was assassinated. entails (B) The president is dead. Notice also that if (B) is false, then (A) must necessarily be false. To show entailment, we must show that (A) true forces (B) to be true and (B) false forces (A) to be false.
  • Entailment differs from implicature (in their definitions for pragmatics), where the truth of one (A) suggests the truth of the other (B), but does not require it. [dubious – discuss] For example, the sentence (A) Mary had a baby and (B) got married implicates that (A) she had a baby before (B) the wedding, but this is cancellable by adding -- not necessarily in that order. Entailments are not cancellable.
  • Entailment also differs from presupposition in that in presupposition, the truth of what one is presupposing is taken for granted. A simple test to differentiate presupposition from entailment is negation. For example, both The king of France is ill and The king of France is not ill presuppose that there is a king of France. However The president was not assassinated no longer entails The president is dead. Presupposition remains under negation, but entailment does not.

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