Classification and Resolution of Ellipses for the Arabic Language

HADDAR Kais, BEN HAMADOU Abdelmajid
Faculté des Sciences Economiques et de Gestion de Sfax
Laboratoire de recherche LARIS, B.P. 1088 Sfax - TUNISIA
Fax (2164) 279 139

Ellipsis phenomenon has been often a major topic of study in theoretical and computational linguistics. In this paper, we describe a new approach to ellipsis resolution for the Arabic language by giving three resolution types which have the feature of minimizing the effort while recovering syntactic representation of an elliptical part. This is resulting from classification criteria established for complex elliptical sentences. Traditional linguistic theory distinguishes ellipsis forms (i.e., Right-node Raising, Gapping, VP-deletion, Coordinate Reduction) according to syntactic structure of elliptical clauses. Syntactic accounts of these ellipsis forms posit the copying of syntactic structure from the well-formed clause representation to the elliptical clause one. The used approaches are generally based on a complex sentence grammar that can not easily locate the elliptical parts of the sentence. In this approaches, elliptical clause occurrence does not play any role. In our approach, we distinguish ellipsis classes according to syntactic structure of elliptical sentences by taking into account the following considerations: occurrence of elliptical clauses, that a sentence contains, alternation of well-formed clause/elliptical clause, and ellipsis form. Unlike to the above mentioned approaches, our approach is based on another type of grammar namely an ATN clause grammar used to identify the well-formed clause and to locate the elliptical ones. The elliptical sentence class determination will be done using a heuristic which can be extended to treat other natural languages. In this work, we try to resolve some ambiguities and to study anaphora phenomenon that can interact with ellipsis.