Entailment above the word level in distributional semantics
Marco Baroni, Raffaella Bernardi, NQ Do, Chung-chieh Shan · Iris (University of Trento) · 2012
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.