English Reference

Word

entailment

Phoneticsen·tail·ment

Definition

n. a relationship between two statements where if the first statement is true, the second statement must also be true.

n. a formal semantic or logical relation wherein the truth of one proposition guarantees the truth of another in all possible interpretations.

Examples

“Saying you own a dog carries the entailment that you own an animal.”

“Natural language inference benchmarks test whether an AI can accurately classify sentence pairs into entailment, contradiction, or neutral.”

“Automated theorem provers construct proof trees by verifying that each intermediate lemma satisfies the strict criteria of semantic entailment.”

Examples

simple

“Saying you own a dog carries the entailment that you own an animal.”

contextual

“Natural language inference benchmarks test whether an AI can accurately classify sentence pairs into entailment, contradiction, or neutral.”

complex

“Automated theorem provers construct proof trees by verifying that each intermediate lemma satisfies the strict criteria of semantic entailment.”

Real-World Examples

“Textual entailment is a relationship that obtains between fragments of text when one fragment in some sense implies the other fragment.”
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technolog · 9 Mar 2018
“In natural language processing, textual entailment (TE), also known as natural language inference (NLI), is a directional relation between text fragments.”
Wikipedia · 28 Sept 2023

Etymology

From Middle English entailen, from Old French entaillier ('to carve, cut into, impose conditions on property transfer'), from en- + taillier ('to cut'). Adopted into formal logic in the early 20th century.

Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Word family

entailVerbentailmentNoun

Domains

AIComputing

This entry

Level
C1 · Advanced
Frequency
Rare
Updated

Scan code

englishreference.com/q/entailment

English Reference