Sentences with Gapping: Parsing and Reconstructing Elided Predicates

Sebastian Schuster, Joakim Nivre, Christopher D. Manning


Abstract
Sentences with gapping, such as Paul likes coffee and Mary tea, lack an overt predicate to indicate the relation between two or more arguments. Surface syntax representations of such sentences are often produced poorly by parsers, and even if correct, not well suited to downstream natural language understanding tasks such as relation extraction that are typically designed to extract information from sentences with canonical clause structure. In this paper, we present two methods for parsing to a Universal Dependencies graph representation that explicitly encodes the elided material with additional nodes and edges. We find that both methods can reconstruct elided material from dependency trees with high accuracy when the parser correctly predicts the existence of a gap. We further demonstrate that one of our methods can be applied to other languages based on a case study on Swedish.
Anthology ID:
N18-1105
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Marilyn Walker, Heng Ji, Amanda Stent
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1156–1168
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1105
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-1105
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sebastian Schuster, Joakim Nivre, and Christopher D. Manning. 2018. Sentences with Gapping: Parsing and Reconstructing Elided Predicates. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers), pages 1156–1168, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Sentences with Gapping: Parsing and Reconstructing Elided Predicates (Schuster et al., NAACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1105.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/N18-1105.mp4
Code
 sebschu/naacl-gapping +  additional community code
Data
Penn TreebankUniversal Dependencies