Looking more generally, there is an obvious potential connection between antecedent selection for ellipsis and the problem of coreference resolution (see Hardt (1999) for an explicit theoretical link between the two).
entity coreference resolution is a problem with two major differences from ellipsis antecedent detection: a) the antecedent and anaphor often share a variety of syntactic, semantic, and morphological characteristics that can be featurally exploited; b) entity expressions in a text are often densely coreferent, which can help provide proxies for discourse salience of an entity.