Inference in the Resolution of Ellipsis.

We discuss the treatment of ellipsis in a spoken language route planning enquiry service which uses the Core Language Engine (CLE) as its linguistic processor. We show how use of the CLE allows us to separate the interpretation of ellipsis in a dialogue context from the more general issue of dialogue management in a dialogue context and, especially, to factor out the linguistic innuences on such interpretation and place them where they belong-in the linguistic processor. The route planning application was developed with a Wizard of Oz corpus to help guide it and we discuss the application of the CLE to some particularly interesting and potentially troublesome data from that corpus.