FBK: Cross-Lingual Textual Entailment Without Translation

This paper overviews FBK’s participation in the Cross-Lingual Textual Entailment for Content Synchronization task organized within SemEval-2012. Our participation is characterized by using cross-lingual matching features extracted from lexical and semantic phrase tables and dependency relations. The features are used for multi-class and binary classification using SVMs. Using a combination of lexical, syntactic, and semantic features to create a cross-lingual textual entailment system, we report on experiments over the provided dataset. Our best run achieved an accuracy of 50.4% on the Spanish-English dataset (with the average score and the median system respectively achieving 40.7% and 34.6%), demonstrating the effectiveness of a “pure” cross-lingual approach that avoids intermediate translations.