"Are you Afraid of Ghosts?" A Proposal for Busting Predicate Ellipsis in Universal Dependencies

This paper addresses the representation of ellipsis in dependency syntax, proposing both a theoretical and a practical workflow for its analysis and annotation in treebanks, following the state-of-the-art Universal Dependencies framework. We discuss the challenges of annotating ellipsis, with a focus on predicate ellipsis and its representation in dependency treebanks, and emphasize the importance of accounting for such phenomena for syntactic analysis and machine learning applications. We present a case study based on the Italian-Old treebank, demonstrating the applicability of the proposed workflows and invite the community to participate in this initiative with their own languages.