Since the dependencies between constituents can be an exponential number and representing structures in learning algorithms is rather challenging, automatic feature engineering through kernel methods (Shawe-Taylor and Cristianini, 2004;Moschitti, 2006) can be a promising direction.
in (Zanzotto and Moschitti, 2006), we represented the two evaluating sentences for the RTE task with syntactic structures and then applied tree kernels to them.