Computing relative polarity for textual inference

What it is about

The paper handles what a sentence commits its author to when complement clauses sit inside other clauses. Implicative verbs (manage to, forget to, refuse to, force to, attempt to) entail or deny their complement depending on the polarity of the environment, so "forget to" commits the author to the opposite of "forget that". The authors compile an implication signature for about 400 of 1,250 complement-taking verbs from the BNC, marking each with a sign for positive and negative environments. Polarity is relative to an ancestor context and is computed recursively down the chain of embedding verbs and negations, so a sentence that denies managing to remember to do something commits the author to the thing not being done. The output is a set of instantiable and uninstantiable event contexts, built inside the XLE system. Presuppositions are left out, and conversational implicatures such as "be able to" in a negative environment are flagged as cancellable rather than entailed.

Ideas

• I1. An implication signature table for Mova, as prag/data/implicatives.tsv (prag has no en directory yet; prag/data holds the other tables). Columns: verb, complement type, sign in positive environment, sign in negative environment, class (two-way, one-way positive, one-way negative, factive, counterfactive, none). Start from our own judgements with two annotators and the VerbNet membership already in prag/data/verbnet.tsv. Leave a verb as "none" when the judgement is unclear.
• I2. Polarity propagation over the frames in prag/src/infer.rs. Walk down the complement chain from the top frame, carry a polarity bit, and mark each event as committed or denied. Each mark stores the chain that produced it, so the explain output shows the path. Test on about fifty of our own sentences with stacked negation, scored by commitment label; run it twice and check the results are the same.
• I3. Keep entailment and implicature apart. "Was able to" in a positive sentence gives a conversational implicature, not a commitment. Label such output as "probably", not "yes", and check the answer changes on yes/no questions in the tales.
• I4. A graded table of factive and speech-act verbs (mention that, report that, say that, deny that), with a commitment strength for each. It links to the attribution work in prag (speech acts). Score on held-out sentences that we write ourselves.

For Mova

The chapters are 27. Negation, 23. Complementation and 33. Implicature and presupposition, plus 31. Speech acts for I4. The code is prag/src/infer.rs and the tables in prag/data. The paper's examples are for reading and writing our own tests; its lookup table is its own work and is not in the repo.

Topics: Implicature

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{nairn2006computing,
  title = {{Computing relative polarity for textual inference}},
  author = {Nairn, Rowan and Condoravdi, Cleo and Karttunen, Lauri},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Inference in Computational Semantics (ICoS-5)},
  year = {2006},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W06-3907/}
}

References

12 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Bobrow, D., C. Condoravdi, R. Crouch, R. Kaplan, L. Karttunen, T. King, V. de Paiva and A. Zaenen, A basic logic for textual inference, in: Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on Inference for Textual Question Answering, Pittsburgh, PA, 2005, http://www2.parc.com/istl/groups/nltt/papers/textual-inference.pdf. ↗
2. Condoravdi, C., R. Crouch, R. Stolle, V. de Paiva and D. Bobrow, Entailment, intensionality and text understanding, in: Proceedings of the Workshop on Text Meaning, Human Language Technology Conference (HLT-NAACL-2003), Edmonton, Canada, 2003, http://www2.parc.com/spl/members/stolle/Papers/condoravdi-textmeaning.pdf. ↗
3. Crouch, R., Packed rewriting for mapping semantics to KR, in: Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Computational Semantics, Tilburg, the Netherlands, 2005, http://www2.parc.com/istl/groups/nltt/papers/iwcs05_crouch.pdf. ↗
4. Crouch, R., R. Sauri and A. Fowler, AQUAINT pilot knowledge-based evaluation: Annotation guidelines (2005), http://www2.parc.com/istl/groups/nltt/papers/aquaint_kb_pilot_evaluation_guide.pdf. ↗
5. Geis, M. and A. Zwicky, On invited inferences, Linguistic Inquiry 2 (1971), pp. 561–565. find
6. Grice, H. P., Logic and conversation, in: P. Cole and J. L. Morgan, editors, Speech Acts, Academic Press, New York, NY, 1989 pp. 41–58. find
7. Ido Dagan, O. G. and B. Magnini, The PASCAL recognising textual entailment challenge, in: Proceedings of the PASCAL Challenges Workshop on Recognising Textual Entailment, Southampton, U.K., 2005, http://www.cs.biu.ac.il/~glikmao/rte05/dagan_et_al.pdf. ↗
8. Karttunen, L., Implicative verbs, Language 47 (1971), pp. 340–358. find
9. Karttunen, L., The logic of English predicate complement constructions (1971), distributed by the Indiana University Linguistics Club. http://www2.parc.com/istl/members/karttune/publications/english_predicate.pdf. ↗
10. Karttunen, L. and A. Zaenen, Veridicity, in: G. Katz, J. Pustejovsky and F. Schilder, editors, Annotating, Extracting and Reasoning about Time and Events, number 05151 in Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings (2005), http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2005/314. ↗
11. Kiparsky, P. and C. Kiparsky, Fact, in: D. Steinberg and L. Jakobovits, editors, Semantics. An Inderdisciplinary Reader, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1971 . find
12. Zaenen, A., L. Karttunen and R. Crouch, Local textual inference: can it be defined or circumscribed?, in: Workshop on the Empirical Modeling of Semantic Equivalence and Entailment, Ann Arbor, MI, 2005, http://www2.parc.com/istl/members/karttune/publications/acl2005workshop.pdf. ↗

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