  Inference in natural language often involves recognizing lexical entailment
(RLE); that is, identifying whether one word entails another. For example,
"buy" entails "own". Two general strategies for RLE have been proposed: One
strategy is to manually construct an asymmetric similarity measure for context
vectors (directional similarity) and another is to treat RLE as a problem of
learning to recognize semantic relations using supervised machine learning
techniques (relation classification). In this paper, we experiment with two
recent state-of-the-art representatives of the two general strategies. The
first approach is an asymmetric similarity measure (an instance of the
directional similarity strategy), designed to capture the degree to which the
contexts of a word, a, form a subset of the contexts of another word, b. The
second approach (an instance of the relation classification strategy)
represents a word pair, a:b, with a feature vector that is the concatenation of
the context vectors of a and b, and then applies supervised learning to a
training set of labeled feature vectors. Additionally, we introduce a third
approach that is a new instance of the relation classification strategy. The
third approach represents a word pair, a:b, with a feature vector in which the
features are the differences in the similarities of a and b to a set of
reference words. All three approaches use vector space models (VSMs) of
semantics, based on word-context matrices. We perform an extensive evaluation
of the three approaches using three different datasets. The proposed new
approach (similarity differences) performs significantly better than the other
two approaches on some datasets and there is no dataset for which it is
significantly worse. Our results suggest it is beneficial to make connections
between the research in lexical entailment and the research in semantic
relation classification.
