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<Paper uid="P92-1002">
  <Title>AN ALGORITHM FOR VP ELLIPSIS</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="9" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> To understand an elliptical expression it is necessary to recover the missing material from surrounding context. This can be divided into two subproblems: first, it is necessary to determine the antecedent expression. Second, a method of reconstructing the antecedent expression at the ellipsis site is required. Most of the literature on ellipsis has concerned itself with the second problem. In this paper, I propose a solution for the first problem, that of determining the antecedent. I focus on the case of VP ellipsis.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> VP ellipsis is defined by the presence of an auxiliary verb, but no VP, as in the following  example 1: (1) a. It might have rained, any time;  b. only - it did not.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> To interpret the elliptical VP &amp;quot;did not&amp;quot;, the antecedent must be determined: in this case, &amp;quot;rained&amp;quot; is the only possibility.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The input to the algorithm is an elliptical VP and a list of VP's occurring in proximity to the elliptical VP. The algorithm eliminates certain VP's IAll examples are taken from the Brown Corpus unless otherwise noted.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4">  that are impossible antecedents. Then it assigns preference levels to the remaining VP's, based on syntactic configurations as well as other factors. Any VP's with the same preference level are ordered in terms of proximity to the elliptical VP. The antecedent is the VP with the highest preference level.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> In what follows, I begin with the overall structure of the algorithm. Next the subparts of the algorithm are described, consisting of the elimination of impossible antecedents, and the determination of a preference ordering based on clausal relationships and subject coreference. I then present the results of testing the algorithm on 304 examples of VP ellipsis collected from the Brown Corpus. Finally, I examine other approaches to this problem in the literature.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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