# Sentences with Gapping: Parsing and Reconstructing Elided Predicates

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.06922 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06922/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Apr 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Crosslinguistic word order variation reflects evolutionary pressures of dependency and information locality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04239/) (2022)
- [Coordinate Constructions in English Enhanced Universal Dependencies: Analysis and Computational Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08955/) (2021)
- [CANDLE: Decomposing Conditional and Conjunctive Queries for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03884/) (2021)
- [Conjunct Resolution in the Face of Verbal Omissions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16740/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sentences with gapping, such as Paul likes coffee and Mary tea, lack an overt predicate to indicate the relation between two or more arguments. Surface syntax representations of such sentences are often produced poorly by parsers, and even if correct, not well suited to downstream natural language understanding tasks such as relation extraction that are typically designed to extract information from sentences with canonical clause structure. In this paper, we present two methods for parsing to a Universal Dependencies graph representation that explicitly encodes the elided material with additional nodes and edges. We find that both methods can reconstruct elided material from dependency trees with high accuracy when the parser correctly predicts the existence of a gap. We further demonstrate that one of our methods can be applied to other languages based on a case study on Swedish.