Is a 204 cm Man Tall or Small ? Acquisition of Numerical Common Sense from the Web

Abstract

This paper presents novel methods for modeling numerical common sense: the ability to infer whether a given number (e.g., three billion) is large, small, or nor-mal for a given context (e.g., number of people facing a water shortage). We first discuss the necessity of numerical com-mon sense in solving textual entailment problems. We explore two approaches for acquiring numerical common sense. Both approaches start with extracting numeri-cal expressions and their context from the Web. One approach estimates the distribu-tion of numbers co-occurring within a con-text and examines whether a given value is large, small, or normal, based on the distri-bution. Another approach utilizes textual patterns with which speakers explicitly ex-presses their judgment about the value of a numerical expression. Experimental re-sults demonstrate the effectiveness of both approaches. 1