Local Textual Inference: Can it be Defined or Circumscribed?

Annie Zaenen, Lauri Karttunen, Richard S. Crouch

Abstract: This paper argues that local textual inferences come in three well-defined varieties (entailments, conventional implicatures/presuppositions, and conversational implicatures) and one less clearly defined one, generally available world knowledge. Based on this taxonomy, it discusses some of the examples in the Pascal text suite and shows that these examples do not fall into any of them. It proposes to enlarge the test suite with examples that are more directly related to the inference patterns discussed.