--- title: "Bridging Textual Ellipses — Hahn 1996" description: "The paper addresses textual ellipsis (functional anaphora) in German." authors: ["Udo Hahn", "Michael Strube", "Katja Markert"] year: 1996 venue: "COLING 1996 Volume 1: The 16th International Conference on Computational Linguistics" source: "https://aclanthology.org/C96-1084/" licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/hahn-1996-bridging-textual-ellipses/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/hahn-1996-bridging-textual-ellipses/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [1996](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/1996/) / Bridging Textual Ellipses # Bridging Textual Ellipses **Authors:** [Udo Hahn](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/udo-hahn/), [Michael Strube](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/michael-strube/), [Katja Markert](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/katja-markert/) · **Year:** 1996 · **Venue:** COLING 1996 Volume 1: The 16th International Conference on Computational Linguistics · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/C96-1084/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/C96-1084.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2046416131) **Citations:** 19 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [9](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read ## Summary The paper addresses textual ellipsis (functional anaphora) in German. A definite noun phrase such as "Ladezeit" (charge time) refers back to an entity from the previous sentence (an accumulator) through an unstated conceptual relation, not through identity. A text understanding system must infer this link, or its knowledge base will be incoherent. The authors propose a hybrid resolver with two parts: - **Conceptual criteria (language-independent):** role chains are searched in a terminological domain knowledge base, and paths are ranked as plausible, metonymic or implausible. - **Information-structure constraints (language-dependent):** these come from a centering model adapted to German. Forward-looking centers are ordered by whether they are bound to the context, not by grammatical role. The method is implemented in a dependency-based German text parser written in Smalltalk. On product-review texts from the information technology domain, it was correct in 95.2% of the cases it attempted. Recall was lower, mostly because the knowledge base lacked concepts. The work shows that encyclopedic domain knowledge combined with discourse structure can resolve bridging references. ## Key points - Path well-formedness requires full connectivity, no cycles and no redundancy. Path patterns were derived from about 60 product reviews and from psycholinguistic findings. Metonymic patterns include producer-for-product, part-for-whole and whole-for-part. - Candidate antecedents are first compared by conceptual strength. When strength ties, the antecedent ranked higher in the Cf of the preceding utterance wins, with context-bound elements outranking unbound ones. - The evaluation knowledge base had 449 concepts and 334 relations. Of 109 ellipses, the system processed 63 and resolved 60 correctly: recall 55.05%, precision 95.2%. - Of 46 false negatives, 42 came from missing concept specifications and 4 from inappropriate triggering conditions. - The lexicon has about 3,000 entries and about 100 word classes, with concepts in LOOM (800 for IT, 500 for medicine). The parser was also tested on medical texts. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/) Topics: [Coreference resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/coreference-resolution/) ## Cited by Cited by 9 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 4 of them have a page here, 5 not yet. - [Cascading Collective Classification for Bridging Anaphora Recognition using a Rich Linguistic Feature Set](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/hou-2013-cascading-collective-classification-bridging-anaphora/) - [Enhanced Word Representations for Bridging Anaphora Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/hou-2018-enhanced-word-representations-bridging-anaphora/) - [Unrestricted Bridging Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/hou-2018-unrestricted-bridging-resolution/) - [Comparing Knowledge Sources for Nominal Anaphora Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/markert-2005-comparing-knowledge-sources-nominal-anaphora/) ## Cite The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{hahn1996bridging, title = {{Bridging Textual Ellipses}}, author = {Hahn, Udo and Strube, Michael and Markert, Katja}, booktitle = {COLING 1996 Volume 1: The 16th International Conference on Computational Linguistics}, year = {1996}, doi = {10.3115/992628.992714}, url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/992628.992714} } ``` - [← previous Bilingual Dictionaries: Past, Present and Future](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/atkins-1996-bilingual-dictionaries/) - [next → Chart Generation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/kay-1996-chart-generation/) - [↑ back to papers of 1996](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/1996/) ## References 16 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Agha, G. & C. [lewitt (1987). Concurrent programming using actors. In A. 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