entailment
a result or implication that something necessarily has
Something that is involved in, required by, or follows necessarily from something else.
a logical connection where one statement must be true if another statement is true
A relation between statements in which the truth of one statement guarantees the truth of another.
an old legal rule that controls who can inherit a family property
A legal arrangement that makes land or property pass only to a particular line of heirs and prevents it from being freely sold or left by will.
- Base: entailment
- Plural: entailments
logical entailment
1Formal logical consequence
a strict logical link where the conclusion must be true if the premises are true
- The proof establishes logical entailment from the axioms to the theorem.
- There is no logical entailment from “Some students passed” to “All students passed.”
- Logical entailment means the conclusion must follow.
- The teacher asked us to check the logical entailment.
mutual entailment
1Two-way necessary implication
when two statements each make the other necessarily true
- If two translations show mutual entailment, they preserve the same core meaning.
- The sentences “The glass is half full” and “The glass is not less than half full” do not always have mutual entailment in ordinary conversation.
- Mutual entailment means both sentences imply each other.
semantic entailment
1Meaning-based necessary implication
a meaning relation where one sentence makes another sentence necessarily true
- The semantic entailment from “Tom is a bachelor” to “Tom is unmarried” depends on the meaning of bachelor.
- Linguists use semantic entailment to test how sentence meanings are related.
- “She whispered” has the semantic entailment that she spoke quietly.
textual entailment
1Text-supported inference relation
when a computer system decides that one piece of text shows another statement is true
- The model was tested on textual entailment: from “A woman is slicing onions,” it should infer “A person is preparing food.”
- Textual entailment datasets are widely used to evaluate natural-language understanding systems.
- The AI task included textual entailment questions.