Alicante University at TAC 2009: Experiments in RTE

This paper discusses the participation of the University of Alicante in the RTE track at TAC 2009. The proposed system faces the entailment recognition by computing shallow lexical deductions and richer inferences based on semantics. Specifically on WordNet, detection of negation terms, named entity recognition, verbs implications and frame semantic analysis. Although the system was designed to deal with 2-way entailment classifications, we also wanted to test its behaviour when tackling the 3-way task. The results achieved overcame the median reached for all participants, however, when processing the ablation tests, which are new measures to evaluate the participants introduced this year, they revealed that despite the effort made to apply semantic knowledge, slight improvements were accomplished by the sophisticated part of the system, which encourages us even more to go on to further research in this line.