Semantic annotation for textual entailment recognition

We introduce a new semantic annotation scheme for the Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) dataset as well as a manually annotated dataset that uses this scheme. The scheme addresses three types of modification that license entailment patterns: restrictive, appositive and conjunctive, with a formal semantic specification of these patterns' contribution for establishing entailment. These inferential constructions were found to occur in 77.68% of the entailments in the RTE 1-3 corpora. They were annotated with cross-annotator agreement of 70.73% on average. A central aim of our annotations is to examine components that address these phenomena in RTE systems. Specifically, the new annotated dataset is used for examining a syntactic rule base within the BIUTEE recognizer, a publicly available entailment system. According to our tests, the rule base is rarely used to process the phenomena annotated in our corpus and most of the recognition work is done by other components in the system.