Automatic Nominalization of Clauses through Textual Entailment

Nominalization re-writes a clause as a noun phrase. It requires the transformation of the head verb of the clause into a deverbal noun, and the verb’s modifiers into nominal modifiers. Past research has focused on the selection of deverbal nouns, but has paid less attention to the word order and word forms for the nominal modifiers. We propose using a textual entailment model for clause nominalization. Experimental results show that a textual entailment model fine-tuned on this task outperforms a number of unsupervised approaches using language model scores.