Ellipsis resolution with underspecified scope

Abstract

The paper presents an approach to ellipsis resolution in a framework of scope under-specification (Underspecified Discourse Representation Theory). It is argued that the approach improves on previous proposals to integrate ellipsis resolution and scope underspecification (Crouch, 1995; Egg et al, 2001) in that application pro-cesses like anaphora resolution do not require full disambiguation but can work directly on the underspecified representation. Furthermore it is shown that the approach presented can cope with the examples discussed by Dalrymple et al. (1991) as well as a problem noted recently by Erk and Koller (2001).