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Taking care of orphans: ellipsis in dependency and constituency-based treebanks

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2015

Abstract

Using results of dependency parsers, where a syntactic daughter missing its parent is dependent on its grandparent, we build a constituency-based treebank, where such cases of ellipsis are restored as appropriately headed phrases, as long as no other solution is available. We arrive at structures of three types: (i) non-elliptical (as in pro-drop ellipsis), (ii) elliptical with the head and mother nodes restored, (iii) elliptical with the original dependency labelling retained.

Finally, we evaluate the processing steps - morphological annotation, dependency parsing, conversion from dependency to constituency, and expressing ellipsis in the resulting structure licensed by a formal grammar.