An Approach to Cross–Lingual Textual Entailment using Online Machine Translation Systems

 

Julio Castillo¹ and Marina Cárdenas²

 

¹ National University of Cordoba – FaMAF, Cordoba, Argentina and also with the National Technological University–Regional Faculty of Cordoba, Argentina (email: jotacastillo@gmail.com).

² National Technological University–Regional Faculty of Cordoba, Argentina (email: ing.marinacardenas@gmail.com).

 

Manuscript received July 1, 2011.
Manuscript accepted for publication October 2, 2011.

 

Abstract

In this paper, we show an approach to cross–lingual textual entailment (CLTE) by using machine translation systems such as Bing Translator and Google Translate. We experiment with a wide variety of data sets to the task of textual Entailment (TE) and evaluate the contribution of an algorithm that expands a monolingual TE corpus that seems promising for the task of CLTE. We built a CLTE corpus and we report a procedure that can be used to create a CLTE corpus in any pair of languages. We also report the results obtained in our experiments with the three–way classification task for CLTE and we show that this result outperform the average score of RTE (Recognizing Textual Entailment) systems. Finally, we find that using WordNet as the only source of lexical–semantic knowledge it is possibly to build a system for CLTE, which achieves comparable results with the average score of RTE systems for both two–way and three–way tasks.

Key words: Cross–lingual textual entailment, textual entailment, WordNet, bilingual textual entailment corpus.

 

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