Textual inference and paraphrase have attracted a significant amount of attention in recent years. Many NLP tasks can be mapped at least partially onto the recognition of textual entailments and the detection of semantic equivalence between texts. Robust and accurate algorithms and lexical resources for inference and paraphrasing can therefore be beneficial for a broad range of NLP applications, and have generally stimulated research in semantics.

TextInfer 2011 invites both theoretical and applied research contributions on the topic of inference. We aim to bring together empirical approaches with formal approaches to inference. We feel that the time is ripe for researchers from both groups to join for this event, with the goal of establishing a discussion on how the two approaches relate to one another, and how to define interfaces between the two methodologies.