It's a contradiction - No, it's not: A case study using functional relations

Alan Ritter; Doug Downey; Stephen Soderland; Oren Etzioni

It's a contradiction - No, it's not: A case study using functional relations

Alan Ritter^*, Doug Downey, Stephen Soderland, Oren Etzioni

^*Corresponding author for this work

Computer Science

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

56 Scopus citations

Abstract

Contradiction Detection (CD) in text is a difficult NLP task. We investigate CD over functions (e.g., BornIn(Person)=Place), and present a domain-independent algorithm that automatically discovers phrases denoting functions with high precision. Previous work on CD has investigated hand-chosen sentence pairs. In contrast, we automatically harvested from the Web pairs of sentences that appear contradictory, but were surprised to find that most pairs are in fact consistent. For example, "Mozart was born in Salzburg" does not contradict "Mozart was born in Austria" despite the functional nature of the phrase "was born in". We show that background knowledge about meronyms (e.g., Salzburg is in Austria), synonyms, functions, and more is essential for success in the CD task.

Original language	English (US)
Title of host publication	EMNLP 2008 - 2008 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference
Subtitle of host publication	A Meeting of SIGDAT, a Special Interest Group of the ACL
Pages	11-20
Number of pages	10
State	Published - Dec 1 2008
Event	2008 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2008, Co-located with AMTA 2008 and the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation - Honolulu, HI, United States Duration: Oct 25 2008 → Oct 27 2008

Other

Other	2008 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2008, Co-located with AMTA 2008 and the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation
Country/Territory	United States
City	Honolulu, HI
Period	10/25/08 → 10/27/08

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Computational Theory and Mathematics
Computer Science Applications
Information Systems

Cite this

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title = "It's a contradiction - No, it's not: A case study using functional relations",

abstract = "Contradiction Detection (CD) in text is a difficult NLP task. We investigate CD over functions (e.g., BornIn(Person)=Place), and present a domain-independent algorithm that automatically discovers phrases denoting functions with high precision. Previous work on CD has investigated hand-chosen sentence pairs. In contrast, we automatically harvested from the Web pairs of sentences that appear contradictory, but were surprised to find that most pairs are in fact consistent. For example, {"}Mozart was born in Salzburg{"} does not contradict {"}Mozart was born in Austria{"} despite the functional nature of the phrase {"}was born in{"}. We show that background knowledge about meronyms (e.g., Salzburg is in Austria), synonyms, functions, and more is essential for success in the CD task.",

author = "Alan Ritter and Doug Downey and Stephen Soderland and Oren Etzioni",

year = "2008",

month = dec,

day = "1",

language = "English (US)",

pages = "11--20",

booktitle = "EMNLP 2008 - 2008 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference",

note = "2008 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2008, Co-located with AMTA 2008 and the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation ; Conference date: 25-10-2008 Through 27-10-2008",

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Ritter, A, Downey, D, Soderland, S & Etzioni, O 2008, It's a contradiction - No, it's not: A case study using functional relations. in EMNLP 2008 - 2008 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference: A Meeting of SIGDAT, a Special Interest Group of the ACL. pp. 11-20, 2008 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2008, Co-located with AMTA 2008 and the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation, Honolulu, HI, United States, 10/25/08.

It's a contradiction - No, it's not: A case study using functional relations. / Ritter, Alan; Downey, Doug; Soderland, Stephen et al.
EMNLP 2008 - 2008 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference: A Meeting of SIGDAT, a Special Interest Group of the ACL. 2008. p. 11-20.

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

TY - GEN

T1 - It's a contradiction - No, it's not

T2 - 2008 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2008, Co-located with AMTA 2008 and the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation

AU - Ritter, Alan

AU - Downey, Doug

AU - Soderland, Stephen

AU - Etzioni, Oren

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N2 - Contradiction Detection (CD) in text is a difficult NLP task. We investigate CD over functions (e.g., BornIn(Person)=Place), and present a domain-independent algorithm that automatically discovers phrases denoting functions with high precision. Previous work on CD has investigated hand-chosen sentence pairs. In contrast, we automatically harvested from the Web pairs of sentences that appear contradictory, but were surprised to find that most pairs are in fact consistent. For example, "Mozart was born in Salzburg" does not contradict "Mozart was born in Austria" despite the functional nature of the phrase "was born in". We show that background knowledge about meronyms (e.g., Salzburg is in Austria), synonyms, functions, and more is essential for success in the CD task.

AB - Contradiction Detection (CD) in text is a difficult NLP task. We investigate CD over functions (e.g., BornIn(Person)=Place), and present a domain-independent algorithm that automatically discovers phrases denoting functions with high precision. Previous work on CD has investigated hand-chosen sentence pairs. In contrast, we automatically harvested from the Web pairs of sentences that appear contradictory, but were surprised to find that most pairs are in fact consistent. For example, "Mozart was born in Salzburg" does not contradict "Mozart was born in Austria" despite the functional nature of the phrase "was born in". We show that background knowledge about meronyms (e.g., Salzburg is in Austria), synonyms, functions, and more is essential for success in the CD task.

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ER -

It's a contradiction - No, it's not: A case study using functional relations

Abstract

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ASJC Scopus subject areas

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