In this paper, we introduce a new framework for recognizing textual entailment which depends on extraction of the set of publiclyheld beliefs – known as discourse commitments – that can be ascribed to the author of a text or a hypothesis. Once a set of commitments have been extracted from a t-h pair, the task of recognizing textual entailment is reduced to the identification of the commitments from a t which support the inference of the h. Promising results were achieved: our system correctly identified more than 80 % of examples from the RTE-3 Test Set correctly, without the need for additional sources of training data or other web-based resources. 1

Named Entity recognition (NER) is an important part of many natural language processing tasks. Current approaches often employ machine learning techniques and require supervised data. However, many languages lack such resources. This paper presents an (almost) unsupervised learning algorithm for automatic discovery of Named Entities (NEs) in a resource free language, given a bilingual corpora in which it is weakly temporally aligned with a resource rich language. NEs have similar time distributions across such corpora, and often some of the tokens in a multi-word NE are transliterated. We develop an algorithm that exploits both observations iteratively. The algorithm makes use of a new, frequency based, metric for time distributions and a resource free discriminative approach to transliteration. Seeded with a small number of transliteration pairs, our algorithm discovers multi-word NEs, and takes advantage of a dictionary (if one exists) to account for translated or partially translated NEs. We evaluate the algorithm on an English-Russian corpus, and show high level of NEs discovery in Russian. 1