Tense Manages to Predict Implicative Behavior in Verbs

Implicative verbs (e.g. manage) entail their complement clauses, while non-implicative verbs (e.g. want) do not. For example, while managing to solve the problem entails solving the problem, no such inference follows from wanting to solve the problem. Differentiating between implicative and non-implicative verbs is therefore an essential component of natural language understanding, relevant to applications such as textual entailment and summarization. We present a simple method for predicting implicativeness which exploits known constraints on the tense of implicative verbs and their complements. We show that this yields an effective, data-driven way of capturing this nuanced property in verbs.