Extraction of Entailed Semantic Relations Through Syntax-based Comma Resolution

Vivek Srikumar, Roi Reichart, Mark Sammons, Ari Rappoport and Dan Roth

Proceedings of ACL-08: HLT, 2008.

Abstract

This paper studies textual inference by investigating comma structures, which are highly frequent elements whose major role in the extraction of semantic relations has not been hitherto recognized. We introduce the problem of comma resolution, defined as understanding the role of commas and extracting the relations they imply. We show the importance of the problem using examples from Textual Entailment tasks, and present A Sentence Transformation Rule Learner (ASTRL), a machine learning algorithm that uses a syntactic analysis of the sentence to learn sentence transformation rules that can then be used to extract relations. We have manually annotated a corpus identifying comma structures and relations they entail and experimented with both gold standard parses and parses created by a leading statistical parser, obtaining F-scores of 80.2% and 70.4% respectively.

Bib Entry

@inproceedings{srikumar2008extraction,
  author = {Srikumar, Vivek and Reichart, Roi and Sammons, Mark and Rappoport, Ari and Roth, Dan},
  title = {{Extraction of Entailed Semantic Relations Through Syntax-based Comma Resolution}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of ACL-08: HLT},
  year = {2008}
}

Vivek Srikumar