Learning to jointly predict ellipsis and comparison structures

Abstract

Domain-independent meaning representation of text has received a renewed interest in the NLP community. Comparison plays a crucial role in shaping objective and subjective opinion and measurement in natural language, and is often expressed in complex constructions including ellipsis. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for jointly capturing the semantic structure of comparison and ellipsis constructions. Our framework models ellipsis and comparison as interconnected predicate-argument structures, which enables automatic ellipsis resolution. We show that a structured prediction model trained on our dataset of 2,800 gold annotated review sentences yields promising results. Together with this paper we release the dataset and an annotation tool which enables two-stage expert annotation on top of tree structures.