Subdeletion in Verb Phrase Ellipsis

This paper stems from an ongoing research project ~ on verb phrase ellipsis. The project's goals are to implement a verb phrase ellipsis resolution algorithm, automatically test the algorithm on corpus data, then automatically evaluate the algorithm against human-generated answers. The paper will establish the current status of the algorithm based on this automatic evaluation, categorizing current problem situations. An algorithm to handle one of these problems, the ease of subdeletion, will be described and evaluated. The algorithm attempts to detect and solve subdeletion by locating adjuncts of similar types in a verb phrase ellipsis and corresponding antecedent.