Towards language understanding: question answering and textual ‘entailment’

After a brief introduction about the role of questing answering and textual inferencing in language understanding, we discuss the PASCAL RTE challenge. We describe an experiment that was intended to evaluate how close the RTE challenge comes to representing the judgments of the 'man in the street'. We then decompose the textual inferencing task in real entailments and in more pragmatic notions and illustrate how the PARC XLE system handles both kinds of inferences.