Detecting contradictive statements is a foundational and challenging task for text understanding applications such as textual entailment. In this article, we aim to address the problem of the shortage of specific background knowledge in contradiction detection. A novel contradiction detecting approach based on the distribution of the query composed of critical mismatch combinations on the Internet is proposed to tackle the problem. By measuring the availability of mismatch conjunction phrases

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... CPs), the background knowledge about two target statements can be implicitly obtained for identifying contradictions. Experiments on three different configurations show that the MCP-based approach achieves remarkable improvement on contradiction detection and can significantly improve the performance of textual entailment recognition.