RASAL Lingüística

Issue 2023 - Vol. 2
Artículos

A generative syntax for the computational modeling of Spanish nominal ellipsis

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  • Hazel Barahona Gamboa
Hazel Barahona Gamboa
Universidad Nacional Arturo Prat
Portada del número 2023 vol. 2
DOI: https://doi.org/10.56683/rs232089

Published 2023-09-30

Keywords

  • grammar,
  • nominal ellipsis,
  • generative grammar,
  • Partial Identity Theory,
  • computational linguistic

How to Cite

Barahona Gamboa, H. (2023). A generative syntax for the computational modeling of Spanish nominal ellipsis. RASAL Lingüística, (2), 35–57. https://doi.org/10.56683/rs232089

Copyright (c) 2023 RASAL Lingüística

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Abstract

In this paper, Spanish nominal ellipsis is studied from the general principles of Generative Grammar (Chomsky, 1965, 1995) and Partial Identity Theory (Saab, 2008, 2019). On the basis of their explanation, nominal ellipsis is represented in a computational grammar capable of not only identifying this information, but also of replacing the respective nominal element that had been elided. Even though a computational component is shown, the main focus is on the grammatical structure and how this is a suitable tool to solve some problems of automatic identification of these constructions and similar ones. However, nominal ellipsis has not been as meticulously studied as verbal ellipsis has. To verify the computational representation of this syntactic phenomenon, two tools were created in NooJ (Silberztein, 2005, 2016): an electronic dictionary and a computational grammar. Both were evaluated in a 423,000-word corpus from the medical domain. It is important to mention that this computational grammar was not trained or previously modified in any other corpus. In a manual revision, 355 cases of ellipsis were identified, 335 of which were detected. The results were the following: 99.11% of accuracy, 94.36% of coverage and 96.68% of f-measure.

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