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arXiv · 1008.3169

Don't 'have a clue'? Unsupervised co-learning of downward-entailing operators

Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil·Lillian Lee
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Abstract

Researchers in textual entailment have begun to consider inferences involving 'downward-entailing operators', an interesting and important class of lexical items that change the way inferences are made. Recent work proposed a method for learning English downward-entailing operators that requires access to a high-quality collection of 'negative polarity items' (NPIs). However, English is one of the very few languages for which such a list exists. We propose the first approach that can be applied to the many languages for which there is no pre-existing high-precision database of NPIs. As a case study, we apply our method to Romanian and show that our method yields good results. Also, we perform a cross-linguistic analysis that suggests interesting connections to some findings in linguistic typology.

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Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Lillian Lee. 2010-11-27. Don't 'have a clue'? Unsupervised co-learning of downward-entailing operators. https://arxiv.org/abs/1008.3169

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