Classification of composite semantic relations by a distributional-relational model

Abstract Different semantic interpretation tasks such as text entailment and question answering require the classification of semantic relations between terms or entities within text. However, in most cases, it is not possible to assign a direct semantic relation between entities/terms. This paper proposes an approach for composite semantic relation classification using one or more relations between entities/term mentions, extending the traditional semantic relation classification task. The proposed model is different from existing approaches which typically use machine learning models built over lexical and distributional word vector features in that is uses a combination of a large commonsense knowledge base of binary relations, a distributional navigational algorithm and sequence classification to provide a solution for the composite semantic relation classification problem. The proposed approach outperformed existing baselines with regard to F1-score, Accuracy, Precision and Recall.