English

Multivalent Entailment Graphs for Question Answering

Computation and Language 2021-09-21 v2

Abstract

Drawing inferences between open-domain natural language predicates is a necessity for true language understanding. There has been much progress in unsupervised learning of entailment graphs for this purpose. We make three contributions: (1) we reinterpret the Distributional Inclusion Hypothesis to model entailment between predicates of different valencies, like DEFEAT(Biden, Trump) entails WIN(Biden); (2) we actualize this theory by learning unsupervised Multivalent Entailment Graphs of open-domain predicates; and (3) we demonstrate the capabilities of these graphs on a novel question answering task. We show that directional entailment is more helpful for inference than bidirectional similarity on questions of fine-grained semantics. We also show that drawing on evidence across valencies answers more questions than by using only the same valency evidence.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2104.07846,
  title  = {Multivalent Entailment Graphs for Question Answering},
  author = {Nick McKenna and Liane Guillou and Mohammad Javad Hosseini and Sander Bijl de Vroe and Mark Johnson and Mark Steedman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.07846},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Accepted to EMNLP 2021

R2 v1 2026-06-24T01:13:36.800Z