Design of a semantic parser with support to ellipsis resolution in a Chinese spoken language dialogue system

In this paper, a semantic parser with support to ellipsis resolution in a Chinese spoken language dialogue system is proposed. The grammar and parsing strategy of this parser is designed to address the characteristics of spoken language and to support the ellipsis resolution. Namely, it parses the user utterance with a domain-specific semantic grammar based on a template-filling approach. Syntactic constraints extracted by a Generalized LR parser are also used in the parsing process. With a paradigm of two-state bottom-up parsing and a scoring scheme, the ellipsis resolution module is integrated into the parser seamlessly. The parsing result is represented by a linked structure of semantic frames, which is convenient to both the parser and its successive components of the dialogue system.