An Empirical Approach to VP Ellipsis

Empirical Methods in Discourse: Interpretation and Generation

Volume

Papers from the 1995 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

A system for automatically identifying ~nd resolving VP ellipsis is described. Automatic idenlifi(: ation of VP ellipsis is performed by matching tree patterns in a parsed corpus. The antecedent is determined through the use of a syntactic filter on possible antecedents, together with preference factors such as recency, structural prominence, priming, and parallelism. In a test performed on examples from the Penn Treebank. the system selected the correct, antecedent in 83.5% of VP ellipsis occurrences.