Cross-Modular Approaches to Ellipsis

Workshop August 8-12, and organized as part of the 17th European Summer School on Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) August 8-19, 2005, Edinburgh, Scotland

Workshop Organizers:

Jennifer Spenader (j.spenader(a)gmail.com)
Petra Hendriks (p.hendriks(a)let.rug.nl)

Workshop Program

Day	First Speaker	Second Speaker
Monday August 8th	Welcome and Introduction: Why Be Silent? Functions of Ellipsis Petra Hendriks and Jennifer Spenader	Cumulative Effects in the Evaluation of Psuedo-gapping Jack Hoeksema
Tuesday August 9th	Ellipsis and Minimal Inference Dan Hardt	Ellipsis in Spontaneous Spoken Language Manuel Alcantara Pia and Nuria Bertomeu Catello
Wednesday August 10th	A corpus study towards the generation of elliptical utterances in a dialogue system Stina Ericsson	Generating Ellipsis Using Discourse Structures Feikje Hielkema, Mariet Theune and Petra Hendriks
Thursday August 11th	Indefinites and Sluicing. A type-logical approach Gerhard Jaeger	A Type-Theoretical Approach to Ellipsis Resolution in Dialogue Raquel Fernandez
Friday August 12th	The Discourse Characteristics of Gapping: When Negation Takes Widest Scope Sophie Repp	Panel Discussion: Open problems in Ellipsis TBA

The area of ellipsis resolution and generation has long been neglected in work on natural language processing, and there are few examples of systems or computational algorithms. However, the misuse or non-use of ellipsis in highly preferred contexts can make a dialogue difficult to understand similar to the way inappropriate referential expressions can impede comprehension. This workshop will provide a forum for researchers to present data that give insights into the nature and function of ellipsis from a discourse perspective as well as present methods to deal with ellipsis in NLP applications.

Additionally, we encourage discussion about how information from several knowledge sources (syntax, semantics, pragmatics, world knowledge) can be used to resolve and generate elliptical expressions, emphasizing approaches that draw on empirical results or have been tested in actual implementations.

More specifically, we encourage contributions related to :

implemented ellipsis resolution algorithms that incorporate information from more than one linguistic module

appropriate generation of ellipsis

studies of ellipsis in dialogue and the relation of ellipsis to discourse structure

formalized treatments of ellipsis that incorporate semantic, pragmatic and discourse structural information

corpus studies of ellipitical phenomena

elicitation tasks that give insights into interpretation or generation of elliptical phenomena

Invited Speaker

Dan Hardt (Copenhagen Business School)
Gerhard Jaeger (University of Bielefield)

Accepted papers

A corpus study towards the generation of elliptical utterances in a dialogue system
Stina Ericsson

Ellipsis in Spontaneous Spoken Language
Manuel Alcantara Pia and Nuria Bertomeu Catello

The Discourse Characteristics of Gapping: When Negation Takes Widest Scope
Sophie Repp

A Type-Theoretical Approach to Ellipsis Resolution in Dialogue
Raquel Fernandez

Generating Ellipsis Using Discourse Structures
Feikje Hielkema, Mariet Theune and Petra Hendriks

WITHDRAWN Verb Phrase Ellipsis Site Detection and Antecedent Location Using Automatically Parsed Text
Leif Arda Nielsen

Cumulative Effects in the Evaluation of Pseudo-gapping
Jack Hoeksema

(Alternate)General but Inescapable Constraints on VP Ellipsis
Philippe Kreutz

Submission details:

Authors are invited to submit an extended abstract. Submissions should not exceed 6 pages. The following formats are accepted: PDF, PS, ASCII text. Please send your submission by email to j.spenader(a)gmail.com by the deadline listed below. As reviewing will be blind, please refrain from including identifying information on submitted abstracts. Instead the accompanying email should contain contact information about the author(s). The submissions will be reviewed by the workshop's Program Committee and additional reviewers. The final versions will need to be formatted in latex and more information will be given later to accepted authors. The accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings published by ESSLLI. There is also the possibility of a subset of papers from the workshop when subsequently revised being published in a guest-edited issue of Research on Language and Computation.

Workshop format:

The workshop is part of ESSLLI and is open to all ESSLLI participants. It will consist of five 90-minute sessions held over five consecutive days in the first week of ESSLLI. There will be two slots for paper presentation and discussion per session. On the first day the workshop organizers will give an introduction to the topic.

Format of papers for proceedings

Accepted speakers are invited to contribute a paper to the proceedings. The paper may be up to 8 pages long and should be formatted by using one of the style files listed below (Special thanks to the SUB9 team for providing their stylefiles!):

Microsoft Word Style Files

Latex Style Files

Please send me both the .doc or .tex file as well as a .pdf version of your paper by May 18th if you want it to be included in the proceedings. Please contact me (jennifer@gmail.com) if you have any questions or problems.

Important Dates

Submissions: March 9, 2005
Notification: April 18, 2005
Preliminary programme: April 23, 2005
ESSLLI early registration: May 1, 2005
Final papers for proceedings: May 18, 2005
Final programme: June 22, 2005
Workshop dates: August 8-12, 2005

Program Committee

Maria Aloni (University of Amsterdam)
Gosse Bouma (University of Groningen)
Oesten Dahl (Stockholm University)
Dan Hardt (Copenhagen Business School)
John Hoeks (University of Groningen)
Jack Hoeksema (University of Groningen)
Gerhard Jaeger (University of Bielefeld)
Jason Merchant (University of Chicago)
Mariet Theune (University of Twente)

Local Arrangements:

All workshop participants including the presenters will be required to register for ESSLLI. The registration fee for authors presenting a paper will correspond to the early student/workshop speaker registration fee. Moreover, a number of additional fee waiver grants will be made available by the OC on a competitive basis and workshop participants are eligible to apply for those. There will be no reimbursement for travel costs and accommodation. Workshop speakers who have difficulty in finding funding should contact the local organizing committee to ask for the possibilities for a grant. -->

June 1, 2005
Contents by Jennifer Spenader <j.k.spenader(at)let.rug.nl>