Automatic Bare Sluice Disambiguation in Dialogue∗

The capacity to recognise and interpret sluices—bare wh-phrases that exhibit a sentential meaning—is essential to maintaining cohesive interaction between human users and a machine interlocutor in a dialogue system. In this paper we present a machine learning approach to sluice disambiguation in dialogue. Our experiments, based on solid theoretical considerations, show that applying machine learning techniques using a compact set of features that can be automatically identified from PoS markings in a corpus can be an efficient tool to disambiguate between sluice interpretations.