Recognizing Textual Entailment: Models and Applications (Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies)

In the last few years, a number of NLP researchers have developed and participated in the task of Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE). This task encapsulates Natural Language Understanding capabilities within a very simple interface: recognizing when the meaning of a text snippet is contained in the meaning of a second piece of text. This simple abstraction of an exceedingly complex problem has broad appeal partly because it can be conceived also as a component in other NLP applications, from Machine Translation to Semantic Search to Information Extraction. It also avoids commitment to any specific meaning representation and reasoning framework, broadening its appeal within the research community. This level of abstraction also facilitates evaluation, a crucial component of any technological advancement program. This book explains the RTE task formulation adopted by the NLP research community, and gives a clear overview of research in this area. It draws out commonalities in this research, detailing the intuitions behind dominant approaches and their theoretical underpinnings. This book has been written with a wide audience in mind, but is intended to inform all readers about the state of the art in this fascinating field, to give a clear understanding of the principles underlying RTE research to date, and to highlight the short- and long-term research goals that will advance this technology.

Ido Dagan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. His interests are in applied semantic processing, focusing on the development of generic textual inference models, knowledge acquisition methods, and novel application schemes that are based on them. Dagan and colleagues defined the textual entailment recognition task and organized the series of Recognizing Textual Entailment Challenges. He was the President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 2010 and served on its Executive Committee during 2008-2011. In that capacity, he led the establishment of the Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics journal. Dagan received his B.A. summa cum laude and his Ph.D. (1992) in Computer Science from the Technion. He was a research fellow at the IBM Haifa Scientific Center (1991) and a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories (1992-1994). During 1998-2003 he was co-founder and CTO of FocusEngine and VP of Technology of LingoMotors.