The goal of the present contribution is to put under scrutiny the language phenomenon commonly called ellipsis or deletion, especially from the point of view of its representation in the underlying syntactic level of a dependency based syntactic description. We first give a brief account of the treatment of ellipsis in some present day dependency-based accounts of this phenomenon (Sect. 1). The...

It has been widely assumed that VP ellipsis is governed by an identity condition: the elided VP is interpreted as an identical copy of another expression in surrounding discourse. For example, Sag (76) imposes an identity condition on Logical Form representations of VP's. A basic feature of this account is the requirement that a syntactic VP be available as the antecedent. This requirement is r...

Based on Johnson's (1994) across-the-board (ATB) movement analysis of Gapping, Agbayani and Zoerner (2004) argue that Gapping involves the application of sideward movement of the main verb out of coordinate structures. In this paper, I show that the verb movement analyses of Gapping are problematic. Ultimately, I maintain that Gapping is a discourse-oriented variant of TP ellipsis. More precise...

The proper linguistic representation of ellipsis has been a source of debate for years (Hankamer and Sag, 1976), with ellipsis theories broadly categorizable as being either syntactic or semantic, depending on whether or not an elided constituent is held to contain articulated syntactic structure. In this paper, I combine ideas from both syntactic and semantic theories in order to (1) account f...

Although considerable work exists on the subject of ellipsis resolution, there has been very little empirical, corpus-based work on it. We propose a system which will take free text and (i) detect instances of Verb Phrase ellipsis, (ii) identify their antecedents and (iii) resolve them, providing an end-to-end solution. For each of the steps, manually developed methods and machine learning tech...

Several natural language systems (e.g., Bobrow et al., 1977; Hendrix et al., 1978; Kwasny and Sondheimer, 1979) include heuristics for replacement and repetition ellipsis, but not expansion ellipsis. One general strategy has been to substitute fragments into the analysis of the previous input, e.g., substituting parse trees of the elliptical input into the parse trees of the previous input in L...

It has long been known that anaphoric relationships in the implicit meaning of an elided verb phrase depend on corresponding anaphoric relationships in the source of the ellipsis. This squib concernswhat the underlying cause of this dependency is. Does it arise directly through some uniform relation between the two clauses, or does it follow indirectly from independently motivated discourse pri...

While interest in biomedical question answering has been growing, research in consumer health question answering remains relatively sparse. In this paper, we focus on the task of consumer health question understanding. We present a rule-based methodology that relies on lexical and syntactic information as well as anaphora/ellipsis resolution to construct structured representations of questions ...

The goal of this paper is to survey annotation of ellipsis in Universal Dependencies (UD) 2.0 treebanks. In the long term, knowing the types and frequencies of elliptical constructions is important for parsing experiments focused on ellipsis, which was also our original motivation. However, the current state of annotation is still far from perfect, and thus the main outcome of the present study...