--- title: "Presupposed Content and Entailments in Natural Language" description: "The paper addresses a gap in the NatLog natural logic system for NLI. 9 references, cited by 5 papers here." authors: ["David Clausen", "Christopher D. Manning"] year: 2009 venue: "Proceedings of the 2009 Workshop on Applied Textual Inference (TextInfer)" source: "https://aclanthology.org/W09-2510/" licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/clausen-2009-presupposed-content-entailments-natural-language/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/clausen-2009-presupposed-content-entailments-natural-language/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2009](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2009/page/2/) / Presupposed Content and Entailments in Natural Language Inference # Presupposed Content and Entailments in Natural Language Inference **Authors:** [David Clausen](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/david-clausen/) and [Christopher D. Manning](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/christopher-d-manning/) · **Year:** 2009 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the 2009 Workshop on Applied Textual Inference (TextInfer)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/workshop-on-applied-textual-inference-textinfer/) ([TextInfer 2009](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/workshop-on-applied-textual-inference-textinfer/2009/)) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W09-2510/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W09-2510.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2068178329) **Citations:** 13 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [5](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/clausen-2009-presupposed-content-entailments-natural-language/cited-by/) in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read ## Summary The paper addresses a gap in the NatLog natural logic system for NLI. NatLog runs negation, monotonicity and implicatures through one projection mechanism, but presuppositions behave differently. They survive negation, yet some operators block them and conditionals can cancel them. The authors add a separate presupposition channel to NatLog's pipeline. Lexical factivity triggers, meaning factive verbs and nouns such as "know" and "realize" and antifactive ones such as "pretend", are found with regular-expression patterns over lemmatized parse trees. Their effects are then projected up the tree using Karttunen's (1973) holes/plugs/filters theory. For each edit from premise to hypothesis, the system computes an atomic presupposition relation, composes these across the edit sequence, and combines the result with NatLog's ordinary entailment relation. This repairs errors the original system made, for instance concluding that Gore won the election from a premise stating that Bush was unaware of Gore's election victory. On a PARC 3-way entailment test set, accuracy rose from 53.95% to 60.53%. The approach suggests that combining specialized reasoners is a workable path toward open-domain NLI. ## Key points - NatLog has 5 stages: linguistic analysis, alignment, lexical entailment classification, entailment projection, and entailment composition. Presupposition handling is added at stages 1, 4 and 5. - Triggers are encoded as tree patterns with a lemma, a scope (SBAR/S complement) and a factivity label (FACT or ANTI). For example, "know" is matched as a VB-headed VP. - Effective factivity is computed bottom-up by pairing the dominated and dominating labels: - ANTI over anything gives ANTI. - FACT over ANTI gives ANTI. - FACT over FACT gives FACT. - Atomic presupposition relations depend on the edit type and the factivity of the edited operator: - Deleting a FACT operator gives Forward; inserting one gives Reverse. - Deleting or inserting an ANTI operator gives Alternation. - Evaluation used the 3-way NLI problems from PARC (the Nairn et al. 2006 group): Augmented NatLog reached 60.53% versus 53.95% for the original. Other trigger types (aspectual verbs, definite descriptions, iteratives) are left for future work. ## Interesting ideas - Keep presupposed content in its own relation channel, separate from asserted content, because the two project through different operators (negation flips assertions but leaves presuppositions intact). - Tag every constituent with an "effective factivity" by recursively composing the labels of all dominating operators, using a small lookup table. - Classify operators by how they treat embedded presuppositions: holes let them through, plugs block them, and filters decide based on the relation between antecedent and consequent. - Describe lexical triggers declaratively as small records: lemma pattern, structural scope, and factivity label. - Build a test set of minimal pairs that stress one phenomenon, such as negated factives and antifactive embeddings, and compare the system with and without the new module. ## For Mova How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests: - **I1** (world): Store presupposed facts in the world of the text with their own provenance tag, so that negating a clause does not erase what its factive verb takes for granted. - **I2** (frames): A walk up the UD tree from each ccomp/xcomp to the root could assign every embedded frame a veridicality label (fact, counterfact, unknown), and the trace stays fully explainable. - **I3** (frames): Add hole/plug/filter features to verb lexicon entries (realize = hole, pretend = plug, if = filter) so that projection becomes a data-driven rule, not ad hoc code. - **I4** (tree): Keep a trigger table keyed on lemma plus UD relation of the complement, so new factives can be added without touching the parser or the inference code. - **I5** (answer): Add negated-factive and pretend-style items to the QA test suites, with the baseline run kept as a control, to check that the presupposition logic actually changes answers. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* ## Institutions - [Stanford University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/stanford-university/) — University, Stanford, United States · 434 works · 314,419 citations 📚 Shelves (4): [🖥️ Computer Science](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/) · 16,667 works · [🤖 Artificial Intelligence](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/artificial-intelligence/) · 16,194 works · [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 16,039 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 15,891 works 🧭 Topics (2): [🧮 Reasoning](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/reasoning/) · 1,426 works · [😉 Implicature](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/implicature/) · 138 works ## Cite Cite as: David Clausen and Christopher D. Manning. 2009. Presupposed Content and Entailments in Natural Language Inference. Proceedings of the 2009 Workshop on Applied Textual Inference (TextInfer). The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{clausen2009presupposed, title = {{Presupposed Content and Entailments in Natural Language Inference}}, author = {David Clausen and Christopher D. Manning}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2009 Workshop on Applied Textual Inference (TextInfer)}, year = {2009}, doi = {10.3115/1708141.1708154}, url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1708141.1708154} } ``` - [← previous The independence of dimensions in multidimensional dialogue act annotation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/petukhova-2009-independence-dimensions-multidimensional-dialogue-act/) - [next → Using Hedges to Enhance a Disease Outbreak Report Text Mining System](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/conway-2009-hedges-enhance-disease-outbreak-report/) - [↑ back to papers of 2009](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2009/page/2/) ## References 9 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Beaver, David I. 2001. Presupposition and assertion in dynamic semantics. Stanford: CSLI. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Beaver%2C+David+I%2E+2001%2E+Presupposition+and+assertion+in+dynamic+semantics%2E+Stanford%3A+CSLI%2E) 2. Bos, Johan and Katja Markert. 2006. When logical inference helps determining textual entailment (and when it doesn’t). In Proceedings of the Second PASCAL Challenges Workshop on Recognizing Textual Entailment. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Bos%2C+Johan+and+Katja+Markert%2E+2006%2E+When+logical+inference+helps+determining+textual+entailment+%28and+when+it+doesn%E2%80%99t%29%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+Second+PASCAL+Challenges+Workshop+on+Recognizing+Textual+En) 3. Hickl, Andrew, John Williams, Jeremy Bensley, Kirk Roberts, Bryan Rink, and Ying Shi. 2006. Recognizing textual entailment with LCC’s GROUND-HOG system. In Proceedings of the Second PAS-CAL Challenges Workshop on Recognizing Textual Entailment. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Hickl%2C+Andrew%2C+John+Williams%2C+Jeremy+Bensley%2C+Kirk+Roberts%2C+Bryan+Rink%2C+and+Ying+Shi%2E+2006%2E+Recognizing+textual+entailment+with+LCC%E2%80%99s+GROUND%2DHOG+system%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+Second+PAS%2DCAL+Challenges) 4. Karttunen, Lauri. 1973. Presuppositions of compound sentences. Linguistic Inquiry 4: 169-93. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Karttunen%2C+Lauri%2E+1973%2E+Presuppositions+of+compound+sentences%2E+Linguistic+Inquiry+4%3A+169%2D93%2E) 5. MacCartney Bill, Trond Grenager, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Daniel Cer, and Christopher D. Manning. 2006. Learning to recognize features of valid textual entailments. In Proceedings of the North American Association of Computational Linguistics (NAACL-06). [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=MacCartney+Bill%2C+Trond+Grenager%2C+Marie%2DCatherine+de+Marneffe%2C+Daniel+Cer%2C+and+Christopher+D%2E+Manning%2E+2006%2E+Learning+to+recognize+features+of+valid+textual+entailments%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+North+Ame) 6. MacCartney, Bill and Christopher D. Manning. 2007. Natural logic for textual inference. In ACL-07 Workshop on Textual Entailment and Paraphrasing, Prague. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=MacCartney%2C+Bill+and+Christopher+D%2E+Manning%2E+2007%2E+Natural+logic+for+textual+inference%2E+In+ACL%2D07+Workshop+on+Textual+Entailment+and+Paraphrasing%2C+Prague%2E) 7. MacCartney, Bill and Christopher D. Manning. 2008. Modeling semantic containment and exclusion in natural language inference. In Proceedings of Coling-08. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=MacCartney%2C+Bill+and+Christopher+D%2E+Manning%2E+2008%2E+Modeling+semantic+containment+and+exclusion+in+natural+language+inference%2E+In+Proceedings+of+Coling%2D08%2E) 8. MacCartney, Bill and Christopher D. Manning. 2009. An extended model of natural logic. In The Eight International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS-8), Tilburg, Netherlands, January 2009 [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=MacCartney%2C+Bill+and+Christopher+D%2E+Manning%2E+2009%2E+An+extended+model+of+natural+logic%2E+In+The+Eight+International+Conference+on+Computational+Semantics+%28IWCS%2D8%29%2C+Tilburg%2C+Netherlands%2C+January+2009) 9. Nairn, Rowan, Cleo Condoravdi, and Lauri Karttunen. 2006. [Computing relative polarity for textual inference](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/nairn-2006-computing-relative-polarity-textual-inference/). In Proceedings of ICoS-5 (Inference in Computational Semantics), Buxton, UK. *Updated 30 October 2026*