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 hight-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.
@inproceedings{Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil+Lee:10a, author = {Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and Lillian Lee}, title = {Don't `have a clue'? Unsupervised co-learning of downward-entailing operators}, year = {2010}, pages = {247--252}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACL Short Papers} }
This material is based upon work supported in part by NSF grant IIS-0910664. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or other sponsors.