OntoSem Methods For Processing Semantic Ellipsis

This paper describes various types of semantic ellipsis and underspecification in natural language, and the ways in which the meaning of semantically elided elements is reconstructed in the Ontological Semantics (OntoSem) text processing environment. The description covers phenomena whose treatment in OntoSem has reached various levels of advancement: fully implemented, partially implemented, and described algorithmically outside of implementation. We present these research results at this point – prior to full implementation and extensive evaluation – for two reasons: first, new descriptive material is being reported; second, some subclasses of the phenomena in question will require a truly long-term effort whose results are best reported in installments.