Papers › Sentences with Gapping: Parsing and Reconstructing Elided Predicates
Sentences with Gapping: Parsing and Reconstructing Elided Predicates
Sebastian Schuster, Joakim Nivre, Christopher D. Manning
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.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections