Evelyne Viegas - Sergei Nirenburg
viegas@crl.nmsu.edu/sergei@crl.nmsu.edu
Computing Research Laboratory, Dept. 3CRL, New Mexico State
University, Las Cruces, NM 88003, USA
Tel: 505 646 1835
Fax: 505 646 6218
In Proceedings of ``Context in Natural Language Processing'', IJCAI'95, Montréal.
The topic of ellipsis has been largely studied in theoretical linguistics, mostly from a syntactic and sometimes from a pragmatic viewpoint. It has often been equated with anaphora. Semantic treatments of ellipsis are rare, in particular in computational linguistics. In this paper we concentrate on the study of event ellipsis from a lexical-semantic viewpoint. We show that event ellipsis can be recovered through the lexical semantics of words, informed by context, what we call a contextual semantic recovery. This involves the study of the kind of information that should be included in the lexicon and also exploring how to combine knowledge from the lexicon and contextual information from the discourse level.
Through our treatment of event ellipsis, we can bring some insight to the questions of the relationships between context, semantics and pragmatics as well as to questions about ``Context-dependent interpretation of natural language''. The work presented here is part of the Mikrokosmos machine translation (MT) project.