Learning verb inference rules from linguistically-motivated evidence

Learning inference relations between verbs is at the heart of many semantic applications. However, most prior work on learning such rules focused on a rather narrow set of information sources: mainly distributional similarity, and to a lesser extent manually constructed verb co-occurrence patterns. In this paper, we claim that it is imperative to utilize information from various textual scopes: verb co-occurrence within a sentence, verb cooccurrence within a document, as well as overall corpus statistics. To this end, we propose a much richer novel set of linguistically motivated cues for detecting entailment between verbs and combine them as features in a supervised classification framework. We empirically demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms previous methods and that information from each textual scope contributes to the verb entailment learning task.