A classification model for semantic entailment recognition with feature combination

Recent years have witnessed the fast development of multimedia platforms in China, such as Youku, LeTV and Weibo. Images and videos are usually uploaded with textual descriptions, such as titles and introductions of these media. These texts are the key to multimedia content understanding, and this paper is dedicated to multimedia understanding with visual content entailment via recognizing semantic entailment in these texts. In fact, the natural language processing community has been manifesting increasing interest in semantic entailment recognition in English texts. Yet, so far not much attention has been paid to semantic entailment recognition in Chinese texts. Therefore, this paper investigates on multimedia semantic entailment with Chinese texts. Recognizing semantic entailment in Chinese texts can be cast as a classification problem. In this paper, a classification model is constructed based on support vector machine to detect high-level semantic entailment relations in Chinese text pair, including entailment and non-entailment for the Binary-Class and forward entailment, reverse entailment, bidirectional entailment, contradiction and independence for the Multi-Class. We explore different semantic feature combinations based on three kinds of Chinese textual features, including Chinese surface textual, Chinese lexical semantic and Chinese syntactic features, and utilize them to feed our classification model. The experiment results show that the accuracy of our classification model for semantic entailment recognition with the feature combination using all the three kinds of Chinese textual features achieves a much better performance than the baseline in Multi-Class and slightly better results than the baseline in the Binary-Class. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.