From the One, Judge of the Whole: Typed Entailment Graph Construction with Predicate Generation

Abstract

Entailment Graphs (EGs) have been constructed based on extracted corpora as a strong and explainable form to indicate context-independent entailment relations in natural languages. However, EGs built by previous methods often suffer from the severe sparsity issues, due to limited corpora available and the long-tail phenomenon of predicate distributions. In this paper, we propose a multi-stage method, Typed Predicate-Entailment Graph Generator (TP-EGG), to tackle this problem. Given several seed predicates, TP-EGG builds the graphs by generating new predicates and detecting entailment relations among them. The generative nature of TP-EGG helps us leverage the recent advances from large pretrained language models (PLMs), while avoiding the reliance on carefully prepared corpora. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that TP-EGG can generate high-quality and scale-controllable entailment graphs, achieving significant in-domain improvement over state-of-the-art EGs and boosting the performance of down-stream inference tasks.