Entailment, intensionality and text understanding

Abstract

We argue that the detection of entailment and contradiction relations between texts is a minimal metric for the evaluation of text understanding systems. Intensionality, which is widespread in natural language, raises a number of detection issues that cannot be brushed aside. We describe a contexted clausal representation, derived from approaches in formal semantics, that permits an extended range of intensional entailments and contradictions to be tractably detected.