To Drop or Not to Drop? Predicting Argument Ellipsis Judgments: A Case Study in Japanese

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Hauptverfasser: Ishizuki, Yukiko, Kuribayashi, Tatsuki, Matsubayashi, Yuichiroh, Sasano, Ryohei, Inui, Kentaro
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Ishizuki, Yukiko
Kuribayashi, Tatsuki
Matsubayashi, Yuichiroh
Sasano, Ryohei
Inui, Kentaro
author_facet Ishizuki, Yukiko
Kuribayashi, Tatsuki
Matsubayashi, Yuichiroh
Sasano, Ryohei
Inui, Kentaro
contents Speakers sometimes omit certain arguments of a predicate in a sentence; such omission is especially frequent in pro-drop languages. This study addresses a question about ellipsis -- what can explain the native speakers' ellipsis decisions? -- motivated by the interest in human discourse processing and writing assistance for this choice. To this end, we first collect large-scale human annotations of whether and why a particular argument should be omitted across over 2,000 data points in the balanced corpus of Japanese, a prototypical pro-drop language. The data indicate that native speakers overall share common criteria for such judgments and further clarify their quantitative characteristics, e.g., the distribution of related linguistic factors in the balanced corpus. Furthermore, the performance of the language model-based argument ellipsis judgment model is examined, and the gap between the systems' prediction and human judgments in specific linguistic aspects is revealed. We hope our fundamental resource encourages further studies on natural human ellipsis judgment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_11315
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle To Drop or Not to Drop? Predicting Argument Ellipsis Judgments: A Case Study in Japanese
Ishizuki, Yukiko
Kuribayashi, Tatsuki
Matsubayashi, Yuichiroh
Sasano, Ryohei
Inui, Kentaro
Computation and Language
Speakers sometimes omit certain arguments of a predicate in a sentence; such omission is especially frequent in pro-drop languages. This study addresses a question about ellipsis -- what can explain the native speakers' ellipsis decisions? -- motivated by the interest in human discourse processing and writing assistance for this choice. To this end, we first collect large-scale human annotations of whether and why a particular argument should be omitted across over 2,000 data points in the balanced corpus of Japanese, a prototypical pro-drop language. The data indicate that native speakers overall share common criteria for such judgments and further clarify their quantitative characteristics, e.g., the distribution of related linguistic factors in the balanced corpus. Furthermore, the performance of the language model-based argument ellipsis judgment model is examined, and the gap between the systems' prediction and human judgments in specific linguistic aspects is revealed. We hope our fundamental resource encourages further studies on natural human ellipsis judgment.
title To Drop or Not to Drop? Predicting Argument Ellipsis Judgments: A Case Study in Japanese
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11315