The Implicit Content of Sluicing

在规划他们的语言表达时，说话者和写作者通常能够省略信息冗余的语法材料，例如当动词“call”在“Fred called，but Sheila didn't”中被省略时。这个过程被称为省略，在世界上的各种语言中都很普遍，在非正式语言和对话中尤其常见。在众多的省略形式中，有一种是“省略”，省略的不是动词，而是整个句子。例如，说话者可能会选择在“He called，but I don't know why”（他打电话来，但我不知道为什么）这句话中的“why”（为什么）后面省略“he called”（他打电话来）这句话。省略会带来具有挑战性的科学和工程问题。过去五、六十年的研究表明，允许省略的原则涉及多种不同的信息（语法结构、语篇语境的动态性和真实世界的知识），但这些原则的确切特征及其相互作用仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。由于缺乏一种关键的资源类型，进展受到了阻碍：省略的恰当使用数据库，其规模足以验证理论，并丰富到足以形成机器学习的基础。该项目的第一个目标是建立这样一个数据库，以供语言科学家和工程师免费使用。该资源将是一个由自然出现的省略号组成的大型精选语料库，并以一定的复杂程度进行注释，以便对一系列分析问题进行定量探讨。随着整理和注释的进行，从数据中出现的模式将被用来调查语法和上下文之间的相互作用，使省略成为可能。由于省略是人类语言的一个普遍特征，更好地理解它是如何工作的，更好地理解人类语言行为本身的本质。该项目还将刺激一个迫切需要的领域的技术创新：设计更复杂的系统，与充满各种省略号的自然人类对话进行交互。

In planning their linguistic expressions, speakers and writers are often able to leave out informationally redundant grammatical material, such as when the verb "call" is omitted in "Fred called, but Sheila didn't". This process, known as ellipsis, is widespread across the languages of the world, and is particularly common in informal language and dialogue. Among the many varieties of ellipsis is sluicing, where what is omitted is not a verb but an entire sentence. For example, a speaker may choose to leave out the understood sentence "he called" after "why" in a sentence like: "He called, but I don't know why".Ellipsis poses challenging scientific and engineering problems. Research over the past 50 or 60 years has demonstrated that the principles permitting ellipsis involve many different kinds of information (grammatical structure, the dynamics of the discourse context, and real-world knowledge), but the precise character of these principles and their interaction is still an open question. Progress has been hampered by the lack of a crucial resource type: databases of felicitous uses of ellipsis that are large enough to validate theories against, and rich enough to form the basis for machine learning.The first goal of this project is to build such a database for sluicing and to make it freely available to language scientists and engineers. This resource will be a large, curated corpus of naturally occurring ellipses, annotated at a level of sophistication that will allow a range of analytic questions to be probed quantitatively. As the curation and annotation proceed, patterns that emerge from the data will be used to investigate the interplay between grammar and context that makes ellipsis possible. Since ellipsis is a pervasive feature of human language, to better understand how it works is to better understand the nature of human linguistic behavior itself. This project should also stimulate technological innovation in an area of urgent need: in designing more sophisticated systems for interfacing with natural human conversation, which is replete with ellipses of every kind.