It's a Contradiction - no, it's not: A Case Study using Functional Relations

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.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: EMNLP
• Authors: Alan Ritter, Stephen Soderland, Doug Downey, Oren Etzioni
• Keywords: Difficult Nlp Task, EMNLP 2008, Hand-chosen Sentence Pairs, Natural Language Processing, Phrases Denoting Functions