The word entailment has many meanings. Please review Wikipedia’s disambiguation page for “entail” for definitions that do not refer to textual entailment.

Textual entailment refers to drawing a relation from an entailing text to an entailed hypothesis.

The Wikipedia page for textual entailment gives the following examples:

Textual entailment can be illustrated with examples of three different relations:

An example of a positive TE (text entails hypothesis) is:

• text: If you help the needy, God will reward you.
• hypothesis: Giving money to a poor man has good consequences.

An example of a negative TE (text contradicts hypothesis) is:

• text: If you help the needy, God will reward you.
• hypothesis: Giving money to a poor man has no consequences.

An example of a non-TE (text does not entail nor contradict) is:

• text: If you help the needy, God will reward you.
• hypothesis: Giving money to a poor man will make you a better person.