Rajat Raina presented a paper on the technique they used for the PASCAL Recognizing Textual Entailment challenge.
“Text entailment” is the problem of deciding if one sentence implies another. For example the previous sentence entails:
- Text entailment is a decision problem.
- One sentence can imply another.
The challenge was of the form: given an original sentence and another sentence predict whether there was an entailment. All current techniques for predicting correctness of an entailment are at the “flail” stage—accuracies of around 58% where humans could achieve near 100% accuracy, so there is much room to improve. Apparently, there may be another PASCAL challenge on this problem in the near future.