Textual Entailment Recognition with Semantic Features from Empirical Text Representation

Textual entailment recognition is one of the basic natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. Understanding the meaning of sentences is a prerequisite before applying any natural language processing (NLP) techniques to automatically recognize the textual entailment. A text entails a hypothesis if and only if the true meaning and intent of the hypothesis follows the text. Classical approaches generally utilize the feature value of each word from word embedding to represent the sentences. In this paper, we propose a new framework to identify the textual entailment relationship between text and hypothesis, thereby introducing a new semantic feature focusing on empirical threshold-based semantic text representation. We employ an element-wise Manhattan distance vector-based feature that can identify the semantic entailment relationship between the text-hypothesis pair. We carried out several experiments on a benchmark entailment classification (SICK-RTE) dataset. We train several machine learning (ML) algorithms applying both semantic and lexical features to classify the text-hypothesis pair as entailment, neutral, or contradiction. Our empirical sentence representation technique enriches the semantic information of the texts and hypotheses found to be more efficient than the classical ones. In the end, our approach significantly outperforms known methods in understanding the meaning of the sentences for the textual entailment classification task.