Sentence Trimming in Service of Verb Phrase Ellipsis Resolution

We describe two methods of improving the coverage of a system that automatically detects and resolves verb phrase ellipsis. Both methods involve recognizing non-core sentence constituents, thereby making the core constituents more easily manipulated by the ellipsis detection and resolution functions. A system evaluation shows increases both in the number of sentences in which ellipsis is detected, and in the percentage of elliptical sentences that can be treated by the system’s methods.