What syntax can contribute in the entailment task

We describe our submission to the PASCAL Recognizing Textual Entailment Challenge, which attempts to isolate the set of Text-Hypothesis pairs whose categorization can be accurately predicted based solely on syntactic cues. Two human annotators examined each pair, showing that a surprisingly large proportion of the data -34% of the test items - can be handled with syntax alone, while adding information from a general-purpose thesaurus increases this to 48%.