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<Paper uid="E93-1025">
  <Title>A Discourse Copying Algorithm for Ellipsis and Anaphora Resolution</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> A simple example of verb phrase (VP) ellipsis is given in sentence (1): (1) John likes his mother, and Bill does too. The stranded auxiliary in the second clause indicates the deletion of a verb phrase, the meaning of which is to be determined from another clause, in this case, the first clause. Following Dalrymple, et al. \[1991\], we term the clause that the VP is copied from the source clause, and the clause which contains the elided VP the target clause. As is well established in the literature, referential elements 1 in the source clause VP may give rise to strict/sloppy ambiguities 1 For present purposes, we will use the term referential elements as synonymous with pronouns. In Section 5 we discuss how this class may be extended to include implicit arguments as well.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> in the target clause; for example in sentence (1) the target clause may receive one of two readings, namely one in which Bill likes John's mother (the strict reading), and one in which Bill likes his own mother (the sloppy reading).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In this paper we address the distribution of strict and sloppy readings in VP-ellipsis and other anaphoric phenomena. In Section 2 we discuss problems with past approaches, as well as support our decision to treat ellipsis resolution as a primarily semantic process. In Section 3 we give a representation for events that exhibits what we term role linking between referential elements and their referents, and describe an algorithm for ellipsis resolution that uses this representation. Section 4 demonstrates how use of this representation and algorithm results in the correct analysis of several problematic cases of ellipsis without appeal to additional constraints. In Section 5 we argue that the strict/sloppy distinction is not a property of ellipsis alone, but is instead inherent in what we term the discourse copying process.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Several discourse copying phenomena at the event and NP level are shown to be accounted for by our algorithm. We conclude in Section 6.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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