Exploring the Steps of Verb Phrase Ellipsis

Verb Phrase Ellipsis is a well-studied topic in theoretical linguistics but has received little attention as a computational problem. Here we propose a decomposition of the overall resolution problem into three tasks—target detection, antecedent head resolution, and antecedent boundary detection—and implement a number of computational approaches for each one. We also explore the relationships among these tasks by attempting joint learning over different combinations. Our new decomposition of the problem yields significantly improved performance on publicly available datasets, including a newly contributed one.

• Natural Language Processing