Discovering asymmetric entailment relations between verbs using selectional preferences

In this paper we investigate a novel method to detect asymmetric entailment relations between verbs. Our starting point is the idea that some point-wise verb selectional preferences carry relevant semantic information. Experiments using Word- Net as a gold standard show promising results. Where applicable, our method, used in combination with other approaches, significantly increases the performance of entailment detection. A combined approach including our model improves the AROC of 5% absolute points with respect to standard models.