We Understand Elliptical Sentences, and Language Models Should Too: A New Dataset for Studying Ellipsis and its Interaction with Thematic Fit

Davide Testa, Emmanuele Chersoni, Alessandro Lenci

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingConference article published in proceeding or bookAcademic researchpeer-review

Abstract

Ellipsis is a linguistic phenomenon characterized by the omission of one or more sentence elements. Solving such a linguistic construction is not a trivial issue in natural language processing since it involves the retrieval of non-overtly expressed verbal material, which might in turn require the model to integrate human-like syntactic and semantic knowledge. In this paper, we explored the issue of how the prototypicality of event participants affects the ability of Language Models (LMs) to handle elliptical sentences and to identify the omitted arguments at different degrees of thematic fit, ranging from highly typical participants to semantically anomalous ones. With this purpose in mind, we built ELLie, the first dataset composed entirely of utterances containing different types of elliptical constructions, and structurally suited for evaluating the effect of argument thematic fit in solving ellipsis and reconstructing the missing element. Our tests demonstrated that the probability scores assigned by the models are higher for typical events than for atypical and impossible ones in different elliptical contexts, confirming the influence of prototypicality of the event participants in interpreting such linguistic structures. Finally, we conducted a retrieval task of the elided verb in the sentence in which the low performance of LMs highlighted a considerable difficulty in reconstructing the correct event.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2023) (Volume 1: Long Papers)
EditorsAnna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages3340–3353
Volume1
ISBN (Print)978-1-959429-72-2
Publication statusPublished - Jul 2023
EventAnnual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2023) - Westin Harbour Castle, Toronto, Canada
Duration: 9 Jul 202314 Jul 2023
https://2023.aclweb.org/

Conference

ConferenceAnnual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2023)
Abbreviated titleACL 2023
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityToronto
Period9/07/2314/07/23
Internet address

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