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Entailment in Semantics

This document discusses the concept of entailment in linguistics and semantics. It defines entailment as meaning that if one statement (A) is true, then another statement (B) must also necessarily be true. Entailments depend on the dictionary definitions of words. The document also discusses the difference between entailment and presupposition, noting that presuppositions are implications that are assumed to be already known, whereas entailments are stronger semantic relations. Determining semantic entailment between text snippets is an important challenge in natural language understanding.

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Rabi Chaudhry
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2K views8 pages

Entailment in Semantics

This document discusses the concept of entailment in linguistics and semantics. It defines entailment as meaning that if one statement (A) is true, then another statement (B) must also necessarily be true. Entailments depend on the dictionary definitions of words. The document also discusses the difference between entailment and presupposition, noting that presuppositions are implications that are assumed to be already known, whereas entailments are stronger semantic relations. Determining semantic entailment between text snippets is an important challenge in natural language understanding.

Uploaded by

Rabi Chaudhry
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Assignment paper

2019

EntailmEnt
in
SEmanticS

English Department
Government Post Graduate College for Women
Haripur
EntailmEnt in linguiSticS:
Linguistic entailments occur when one may draw necessary
conclusions from a particular use of a word, phrase or sentence.
Entailment phrases are relations between prepositions, and are
always worded as, "if A, then B," meaning that if A is true, then B
must also be true. Another way of phrasing this, is; "if A is true,
then B must necessarily be true."

EntailmEnt in SEmanticS:
In semantics, entailment is the principle that under certain
conditions the truth of one statement ensures the truth of a
second statement. It’s also called as strict implication, logical
consequence, and semantic consequence.

Relationship with Semantics:


In semantics, entailments depend entirely on the denotation (also
called the "dictionary definition" of the words in question).

An example of this, as shown in M.Lynne Murphy's Lexical


Meaning would be,

"If it is a shoe, then it is made to be worn on a foot."

This example references the 'footwear' meaning of the word shoe,


and not the adjective, which is considered a different use of the
word and thus a different meaning.

For an entailment to be true, the ‘‘then’’ statement must always


be true when the “if” statement is true. To judge whether an
entailment is true, one can ask,

"Could it ever be the case that B isn't true while A is true?"


In order to accurately recognize entailments, a strong knowledge
of the denotation of the word is required.

Entailment Relations
An entailment can be thought of as a relationship between one
sentence or set of sentences, the entailing expressions, and
another sentence, what is entailed.

We can find countless examples where entailment relations hold


between sentences and countless where they do not. The following
English sentence (14) is normally interpreted so that it entails the
sentences in (15) but does not entail those in (16).

(14) Lee kissed baby-girl affectionately.

(15)
a. Lee kissed baby-girl.
b. Baby-girl was kissed by Lee.
c. Baby-girl was kissed.
d. Lee touched baby-girl with her lips.

(16)
a. Lee married baby-girl.
b. Baby-girl kissed Lee.
c. Lee kissed Baby-girl many times.
d. Lee did not kiss baby-girl.

The Challenge of Determining Meaning


“Semantic entailment is the task of determining, for example,
that the sentence: 'Wal-Mart defended itself in court today against
claims that its female employees were kept out of jobs in
management because they are women' entails that 'Wal-Mart was
sued for sexual discrimination.’’

Determining whether the meaning of a given text snippet entails


that of another or whether they have the same meaning is a
fundamental problem in natural language understanding that
requires the ability to extract over the inherent syntactic and
semantic variability in natural language. This challenge is at the
heart of many high-level natural language processing tasks
including Question Answering, Information Retrieval and
Extraction, Machine Translation, and others that attempt to
reason about and capture the meaning of linguistic expressions.
"Research in natural language processing in the last few years has
concentrated on developing resources that provide multiple levels
of syntactic and semantic analysis, resolve context sensitive
ambiguities, and identify relational structures and abstractions.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ENTAILMENT
AND PRESUPPOSITION
Introduction
Entailment is a relation between sentence meanings, or
prepositions. (Sometimes, speaking loosely, we talk as though it
were a relation between sentences.)

Presupposition can also be seen as a relation between


prepositions, although many linguists (including George Yule)
prefer to see presupposition as strictly pragmatic, and a relation
between a speaker and a preposition.

In any case it is important to see that these are two independent


kinds of relations. A preposition which is presupposed in a
particular utterance may or may not also be entailed.

Entailment (||-)
a) A sentence (meaning) A entails B (A ||- B) if whenever A is
true, then B must also be true. Entailment is a very strong
kind of implication. It is a semantic relation — thus, it holds
no matter what the facts of the world happen to be (it holds
in all possible worlds).

b) Examples:

a. Mary broke the window ||- The window broke

b. Sue and Fred went to the party ||- Sue went to the party
Presupposition (>>)
a) Presuppositions are implications that are often felt to be in the
background — to be assumed by the speaker to be already
known to the addressee.
b) A good diagnostic: presuppositions are shared by members of
‘the S family’ — that is, they remain constant under;

1. Negation (denial)
2. Questioning
3. Embedding under modals (e.g. might, it is possible that)
4. Embedding as the antecedent of a conditional (i.e. in an if-
clause)

c) Example: A speaker of any of the sentences below would be


presupposing that there is a king of France.
i. The king of France is bald.
ii. The king of France is not bald.
iii. Is the king of France bald?
iv. The king of France might be bald/Possibly the king of
France is bald.
v. If the king of France is bald, he should wear a hat in the
winter.

d) A presupposition of the S family may or may not be entailed


by S itself (as it is in the example above), but in any case, it
will not be entailed by the negated, questioned, modal, or
conditioned sentences.
e) Some examples — the presupposition triggers are underlined
in each example. For the first three categories, the
presupposition is also an entailment of the S sentence
(though not the negated version of S). For the last two, the
presupposition is not entailed by S — these are sometimes
called conventional Implicature.
1. Definite referring expressions (singular terms).
 Mary saw/didn't see the horse with two heads>> There
exists a horse with two heads.
 Kepler died/didn't die in misery>> There is some
individual named Kepler.

2. Change of state verbs (start, stop, continue, etc.).


 Joan began/didn't begin planting tomatoes >> Joan had not
been planting tomatoes before.

3. Clefts, other focusing constructions.


 What Bill lost was/wasn't his wallet>> Bill lost something
 It was/wasn't his wallet that Bill lost >> Bill lost something
 Bill lost/didn't lose HIS WALLET>> Bill lost something

4. Honorific terms.
 ‘You are/are not very tall’) >> The addressee is a close friend,
a socially inferior, or an animal.

5. Various modifiers.
 He is an Englishman; he is therefore brave >> Being brave is
a consequence of being English.
 Even Bill could solve that problem>> Bill is the last person
you’d expect to be able to solve the problem.
References:
1. Beth, Evert Willem (1955). Semantic Entailment and Formal Derivability.
2. Murphy, M. Lynne (2010). Lexical Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge Textbooks in
Semantics. pp. 31–40.
3. Sauerland, U (2007). Presupposition and Implicature in Compositional
Semantics. Palgrave.
4. (Gennaro Chierchia and Sally McConnell-Ginet, Meaning and Grammar: An
Introduction to Semantics. MIT Press, 2000)
5. (Rodrigo de Salvo Braz et al., "An Inference Model for Semantic Entailment in
Natural Languages." Machine Learning Challenges: Evaluating Predictive
Uncertainty, Visual Object Classification and Recognizing Textual Entailment,
ed. by Joaquin Quiñonero Candela et al. Springer, 2006)

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