Open AccessDetection and Resolution of Verb Phrase Ellipsis
Author(s) -
Marjorie McShane,
Petr Babkin
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
linguistic issues in language technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1945-3590
pISSN - 1945-3604
DOI - 10.33011/lilt.v13i.1385
Subject(s) - verb phrase ellipsis , ellipsis (linguistics) , computer science , verb phrase , linguistics , verb , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , sentence , context (archaeology) , phrase , modality (human–computer interaction) , modal verb , noun phrase , noun , philosophy , history , archaeology
Verb phrase (VP) ellipsis is the omission of a verb phrase whose meaning can be reconstructed from the linguistic or real-world context. It is licensed in English by auxiliary verbs, often modal auxiliaries: She can go to Hawaii but he can’t [e]. This paper describes a system called ViPER (VP Ellipsis Resolver) that detects and resolves VP ellipsis, relying on linguistic principles such as syntactic parallelism, modality correlations, and the delineation of core vs. peripheral sentence constituents. The key insight guiding the work is that not all cases of ellipsis are equally difficult: some can be detected and resolved with high confidence even before we are able to build systems with human-level semantic and pragmatic understanding of text.