In this paper, we describe a method for assessing student answers, modeled as a paraphrase identification problem, based on substitution by Basic English variants. Basic English paraphrases are acquired from the Simple English Wiktionary. Substitutions are applied both on reference answers and student answers in order to reduce the diversity of their vocabulary and map them to a common vocabula...

This paper presents CELI’s participation in the SemEval The Joint Student Response Analysis and 8th Recognizing Textual Entailment Challenge (Task7) and Cross-lingual Textual Entailment for Content Synchronization task (Task 8).

This paper describes the Cambridge submission to the SemEval-2010 Parser Evaluation using Textual Entailment (PETE) task. We used a simple definition of entailment, parsing both T and H with the C&C parser and checking whether the core grammatical relations (subject and object) produced for H were a subset of those for T. This simple system achieved the top score for the task out of those syste...

This paper explores how a battery of unsupervised techniques can be used in order to create large, high-quality corpora for textual inference applications, such as systems for recognizing textual entailment (TE) and textual contradiction (TC). We show that it is possible to automatically generate sets of positive and negative instances of textual entailment and contradiction from textual corpor...

We present in this paper the structure of a textual entailer, offer a detailed view of lexical aspects of entailment and study the impact of syntactic information on the overall performance of the textual entailer. It is shown that lemmatization has a big impact on the lexical component of our approach and that syntax leads to accurate entailment decisions for a subset of the test data.

Thematic structure, an important factor for textual metafunction, plays a significant role in inspecting and promoting the textual coherence. With a theoretical statement of Thematic theory and TP patterns, this paper proposes the feasibility of the Thematic Operational Approach in the teaching of college English writing. This approach is proved to not only strengthen students’ application awar...

Bioethics case reports generally treat aspects of moral fathomability, characterised and addressed in different ways. This paper reads the case as a textual model of scenarios and draws attention to its structure, narrative shape, linguistic register, and the effects of tone and temporality on reader expectation and responsiveness. Such textual elements of case composition reflect authorial pur...

In this work we investigate methods to enable the detection of a specific type of textual entailment (strict entailment), starting from the preliminary assumption that these relations are often clearly expressed in texts. Our method is a statistical approach based on what we call textual entailment patterns, prototypical sentences hiding entailment relations among two activities. We experimente...

Existing parsers for textual model representation formats such as XMI and HUTN are unforgiving and fail upon even the smallest inconsistency between the structure and naming of metamodel elements and the contents of serialised models. In this paper, we demonstrate how a flexible parsing approach can transparently and automatically resolve a number of these inconsistencies, and how it can eventu...