The generation of textual entailment with NLML in an intelligent dialogue system for language learning CSIEC

This paper introduces the generation of textual entailment within the project CSIEC (computer simulation in educational communication), an interactive Web-based human-computer dialogue system with natural language for English instruction. The generation of textual entailment (GTE) is critical to the further improvement of CSIEC project and other natural language generation program. Up to now we have found few literatures on the general algorithm for GTE. Simulating the process that a human being learns English as a foreign language, we explore our naive approach to tackle the GTE problem and its algorithm within the framework of CSIEC, i.e. rule annotation in NLML, pattern recognition and entailment transformation. The time and space complexity of our algorithm is tested with some entailment examples. An interactive command line textual entailment editor is created to generalize an entailment rule from a case pair of text and entailment. The test version of this innovative GTE approach can be accessed in the CSIEC website. Further works include the rules annotation based on the English textbooks and a GUI interface for normal users to edit the entailment rules.