ParseTalk About Textual Ellipsis

A hybrid methodology for the resolution of text-level ellipsis is presented in this paper. It incorporates conceptual proximity criteria applied to ontologically well-engineered domain knowledge bases and an approach to centering based on functional topic/comment patterns. We state text grammatical predicates for ellipsis and then turn to the procedural aspects of their evaluation within the framework of an actor-based implementation of a lexically distributed parser. Keywords: text understanding, text parsing, text ellipsis, conceptual distance metric, topic/comment, centering approach 1 Introduction The work reported in this paper is part of a large-scale text understanding system for knowledge acquisition from German expository texts. Text phenomena are a particularly challenging issue for the design of appropriate parsers, since lacking recognition facilities either result in referentially incohesive or, even worse, invalid text knowledge representations. In a previous paper (Str..