Daniel Hardt

Discourse parallelism, ellipsis, and ambiguity

In this paper we combine a simple recovery mechanism for ellipsis with a general, discourse account of parallelism to account for a variety of phenomena concerning ellipsis, including Sags wide scope puzzle and complex examples concerning sloppy identity. Our recovery mechanism requires an identity of logical structure between the recovered material and antecedent in the ellipsis. The recovered material and the antecedent are then interpreted independently in their respective contexts, subject only to the general discourse constraints on parallelism. These constraints give a uniform account of parallelism facts, whether or not there is ellipsis.

Ellipsis and the Structure of Discourse

It is generally assumed that ellipsis requires certain parallelism between the clause containing the ellips is and some antecedent clause. We argue that the parallelism requirement generated by ellipsis must be applied in accordance with discourse structure: a matching antecedent clause must be found that locally c-commands the clause containing the ellipsis in the discourse tree. We show that the claim makes several correct predictions concerning the interpretation of ellipsis, both in terms of the selection of the antecedent (in Sluicing and Verb Phrase Ellipsis), and in terms of the possible readings given a particular antecedent (in the “many-clause” puzzle and in Antecedent-Contained Deletion).

Social Data Analytics Tool: A Demonstrative Case Study of Methodology and Software

This chapter presents a methodology and software tool for the analysis of Facebook data. In particular, it describes and demonstrates the analytical framework and computational aspects of the Social Data Analytics Tool (SODATO). SODATO fetches, stores, analyses and visualises data from Facebook walls. The method has been previously applied to the US elections of 2008 (Robertson 2011; Robertson et al. 2010a, 2010b). Here, we replicate and extend the analysis to Danish elections in 2011. Our substantive research question is to measure the extent to which Facebook walls function as online public spheres. To do so, we extract the Facebook walls of three prominent candidates in the 2011 Danish general election. Our findings show overlapping online public spheres and how different types of individuals inhabit these overlapping public spheres and how they provide structure and interpretive information for others.

VP ellipsis and contextual interpretation

A computational account of VP ellipsis is described, in which VPs are represented in the discourse model as contextually dependent semantic objects. It is argued that this approach can handle examples that are not allowed by alternative accounts. An implementation is defined in terms of extensions to the Incremental Interpretation System. The treatment of VP ellipsis is analogous to that of pronominal anaphora. It is suggested that the recency and salience constraints commonly thought to apply to pronominal anaphora might apply in a similar way to VP ellipsis.

Sameness, ellipsis and anaphora

We compare explicit assertions of sameness with analogous elliptical and anaphoric expressions, and find striking differences in their interpretation. We account for those differences with a two part proposal: first, we propose that same is additive, similar to too. Second, same must take scope over a containing event-denoting expression. We give evidence that the scope-taking of same is subject to standard island constraints, and we also show that same always compares two event-denoting clauses that differ in a relevant property.

AN ALGORITHM FOR VP ELLIPSIS

An algorithm is proposed to determine antecedents for VP ellipsis. The algorithm eliminates impossible antecedents, and then imposes a preference ordering on possible antecedents. The algorithm performs with 94% accuracy on a set of 304 examples of VP ellipsis collected from the Brown Corpus. The problem of determining antecedents for VP ellipsis has received little attention in the literature, and it is shown that the current proposal is a significant improvement over alternative approaches.

Generation of VP Ellipsis: A Corpus-Based Approach

We present conditions under which verb phrases are elided based on a corpus of positive and negative examples. Factor that affect verb phrase ellipsis include: the distance between antecedent and ellipsis site, the syntactic relation between antecedent and ellipsis site, and the presence or absence of adjuncts. Building on these results, we examine where in the generation architecture a trainable algorithm for VP ellipsis should be located. We show that the best performance is achieved when the trainable module is located after the realizer and has access to surface-oriented features (error rate of 7.5%).

Marius, the giraffe: a comparative informatics case study of linguistic features of the social media discourse

On February 9, 2014, a giraffe named Marius was put to death by the Copenhagen Zoo in Denmark, sparking a storm of public discussion nationally and internationally. This paper presents a comparative informatics case study of the event. We employ the method of grounded comparison in the examination of the text of postings and articles in social media as well as mainstream media in Danish and English languages. At the macro-structural level, the social media discourse is characterized by arguments grounded in scientific and bureaucratic rationality, cultural and linguistic relativity, and animal ethics. At the micro-genetic level of language use, our findings show that international discourse was much more intense and emotional than the discourse in Danish media as evidenced by the differences in volume, sentiment and topics in English vs. Danish data. While these differences undoubtedly reflect a broad range of cultural, linguistic, organizational and societal factors, we suggest that to some extent the differences might result from specific features of the media landscape in Denmark.

Ellipsis resolution and inference

AbstractY Since Webber (1978) it has been known that ellipsis interpretation sometimes requires inference. However, the literature on ellipsis has largely Ignored this: prominent accounts such as (Sag (1976); Williams (1977); Dalrymple et al. (1991); Fiengo and May (1994) and Hardt (1999)) provide no mechanism for inference in ellipsis resolution. The proposal in Rooth (1992) is an exception to this: Rooth gives several examples in which inference is required in ellipsis interpretation. He argues that ellipsis is subject to two different kinds of licensing conditions: an ellipsis-specific identity condition and a general focus-background condition. Rooth argues that the focus-background condition interacts with inference, while the ellipsis-specific identity condition does not. Rooth does not propose any constraints on inference. This presents an evident problem of overgeneration, since it is possible to come up with some chain of inferences to license virtually any interpretation of an elliptical expression.

Antecedent Selection for Sluicing: Structure and Content

Sluicing is an elliptical process where the majority of a question can go unpronounced as long as there is a salient antecedent in previous discourse. This paper considers the task of antecedent selection: finding the correct antecedent for a given case of sluicing. We argue that both syntactic and discourse relationships are important in antecedent selection, and we construct linguistically sophisticated features that describe the relevant relationships. We also define features that describe the relation of the content of the antecedent and the sluice type. We develop a linear model which achieves accuracy of 72.4%, a substantial improvement over a strong manually constructed baseline. Feature analysis confirms that both syntactic and discourse features are important in antecedent selection.