Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

This paper treats the computation of presupposition and entailment while parsing. We also discuss certain phenomena that presupposition and entailment exhibit, and the details of their computation via tree transformations. In particular, we show how to organize an augmented transition network (ATN) and how to write lexical entries in order to compute presupposition and entailment.

Presupposition and entailment are a subclass of inferences that seem to be tied to the structure of language. Distinguishing presupposition and entailment from the general class of inferences enables this subclass to be computed while parsing. This subclass of inferences is further distinguished in that they appear to be relatively independent of context.