Using Syntax to Resolve NPE in English

Payal Khullar, Allen Antony, Manish Shrivastava


Abstract
This paper describes a novel, syntax-based system for automatic detection and resolution of Noun Phrase Ellipsis (NPE) in English. The system takes in free input English text, detects the site of nominal elision, and if present, selects potential antecedent candidates. The rules are built using the syntactic information on ellipsis and its antecedent discussed in previous theoretical linguistics literature on NPE. Additionally, we prepare a curated dataset of 337 sentences from well-known, reliable sources, containing positive and negative samples of NPE. We split this dataset into two parts, and use one part to refine our rules and the other to test the performance of our final system. We get an F1-score of 76.47% for detection and 70.27% for NPE resolution on the testset. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first system that detects and resolves NPE in English. The curated dataset used for this task, albeit small, covers a wide variety of NPE cases and will be made public for future work.
Anthology ID:
R19-1063
Volume:
Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2019)
Month:
September
Year:
2019
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Ruslan Mitkov, Galia Angelova
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd.
Note:
Pages:
534–540
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/R19-1063
DOI:
10.26615/978-954-452-056-4_063
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Payal Khullar, Allen Antony, and Manish Shrivastava. 2019. Using Syntax to Resolve NPE in English. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2019), pages 534–540, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd..
Cite (Informal):
Using Syntax to Resolve NPE in English (Khullar et al., RANLP 2019)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/R19-1063.pdf