Textual entailment classification using syntactic structures and semantic relations

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a method exploiting syntactic structure, semantic relations and word embeddings for recognizing textual entailment. The sentence pairs are analyzed using their syntactic structure and categorization of sentences in active voice, sentences in passive voice and sentences holding copular relations. The main syntactic relations such as subject, verb and object are extracted and lemmatized using a lemmatization algorithm based on parts-of-speech. The subject-to-subject, verb-to-verb and object-to-object similarity is identified using enhanced Wordnet semantic relations. Further similarity is analyzed using modifier relation, number relation, nominal modifier relation, compound relation, conjunction relation and negative relation. The experimental evaluation of the method on Stanford Natural Language Inference dataset shows that the accuracy of the method is 1.4% more when compared to the state-of-the-art zero shot domain adaptation methods.