Ellipsis Interpretation
|
Supervisor |
|
|
Suitable for |
MSc in Computer Science
|
Abstract
Sentences like: `John likes Chopin, but Mary doesn't', or `John likes films, but not plays' contain ellipsis - `missing' components that have to be filled in from earlier parts of the sentence: John likes Chopin, but Mary doesn't like Chopin', `John likes films, but John doesn't like plays'. If you run the first pair of sentences through a parser like the Stanford parser:
(http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/parser/index.jsp) you will see that it gets the constituent structure right, but doesn't attempt to capture the interpretation (see the dependency representations for semantically relevant information).
This project will attempt to develop and test a post-processing module for the Stanford parser which will interpret some common cases of ellipsis.
Prerequisites: some familiarity with linguistic theories of ellipsis.