Learning to Recognize Textual Entailment in Japanese Texts with the Utilization of Machine Translation

Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) is a fundamental task in Natural Language Understanding. The task is to decide whether the meaning of a text can be inferred from the meaning of another one. In this article, we conduct an empirical study of recognizing textual entailment in Japanese texts, in which we adopt a machine learning-based approach to the task. We quantitatively analyze the effects of various entailment features, machine learning algorithms, and the impact of RTE resources on the performance of an RTE system. This article also investigates the use of machine translation for the RTE task and determines whether machine translation can be used to improve the performance of our RTE system. Experimental results achieved on benchmark data sets show that our machine learning-based RTE system outperforms the baseline methods based on lexical matching and syntactic matching. The results also suggest that the machine translation component can be utilized to improve the performance of the RTE system.