Acquisition of verb entailment from text

The study addresses the problem of automatic acquisition of entailment relations between verbs. While this task has much in common with paraphrases acquisition which aims to discover semantic equivalence between verbs, the main challenge of entailment acquisition is to capture asymmetric, or directional, relations. Motivated by the intuition that it often under-lies the local structure of coherent text, we develop a method that discovers verb entailment using evidence about discourse relations between clauses available in a parsed corpus. In comparison with earlier work, the proposed method covers a much wider range of verb entailment types and learns the mapping between verbs with highly varied argument structures.