--- title: "An Empirical Approach to VP Ellipsis — Hardt 1997" description: "Hardt builds the first corpus-based system for resolving VP ellipsis (VPE). 32 references, cited by 17 papers here." authors: ["Daniel Hardt"] year: 1997 venue: "Computational Linguistics" source: "https://aclanthology.org/J97-4002/" doi: "10.5555/972791.972797" 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/hardt-1997-empirical-approach-vp-ellipsis/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/hardt-1997-empirical-approach-vp-ellipsis/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [1997](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/1997/) / An Empirical Approach to VP Ellipsis # An Empirical Approach to VP Ellipsis **Authors:** [Daniel Hardt](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/daniel-hardt/) · **Year:** 1997 · **Venue:** Computational Linguistics, Volume 23, Number 4 **Link:** [aclanthology.org/J97-4002](https://aclanthology.org/J97-4002/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) — summary only [**69** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W3012555082) OpenAlex, 2026-10-14 · [**17** citations in our library](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/hardt-1997-empirical-approach-vp-ellipsis/cited-by/) of the 140,884 papers whose bibliographies we read · [Computational Linguistics](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/J97-4/) · [licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) - [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/J97-4002/) - [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/J97-4002.pdf) - [DOI 10.5555/972791.972797](https://doi.org/10.5555/972791.972797) - [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W3012555082) **Authors (1)** 1. Hardt, Daniel [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/144610213) Citations and author metrics: OpenAlex, 2026-10-14; authors with the same name are not always told apart. ## What it is about Hardt builds the first corpus-based system for resolving VP ellipsis (VPE). The data are 644 VPE examples found in the parsed Penn Treebank, 260 of them from the Wall Street Journal. A syntactic filter first removes candidate antecedents in impossible configurations. The remaining candidates are ranked by four preference factors: recency, clausal relations, parallelism and quotation structure. On a blind test of 96 WSJ examples, the system gets 94.8% head-overlap success, against 75.0% for a recency baseline. Its exact-match accuracy is 76.0%, against 14.6% for the baseline. Human coders agree on the exact match in 93% of cases. Removing the clausal-relation factor drops the score from 75.9% to 72.8%. ## Ideas - I2. Recency baseline first: report the recency-only score next to the ranked score on the same test set, with the head-overlap and exact-match measures from the paper. A ranker that does not beat recency by a wide margin is not worth its rules. ## For Mova - I1. `en/src/expert.rs`: write the syntactic filter as rules over UD trees. Each rule rejects a candidate verb head in a configuration where VPE cannot take it as antecedent, and the rule name is logged in `en/src/explain.rs`, so every rejection can say why. - I3. Factor ablation on training data only: drop each preference factor in turn, as the paper does for Clause-Rel, and report the drop with `en folds`. The test set stays held out until the release check. The code is `en/src/expert.rs` and `en/src/explain.rs`. The chapter is [languages/en/29-ellipsis-word-order-information-structure.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/29-ellipsis-word-order-information-structure/). The Penn Treebank data is licensed, so the paper's numbers are not Mova numbers and no Penn data goes into what is built. Measure first on a VPE set whose licence allows testing: check the licence before any run. ## Cite Cite as Daniel Hardt. 1997. An Empirical Approach to VP Ellipsis. Computational Linguistics. The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.5555/972791.972797](https://doi.org/10.5555/972791.972797) ```bibtex @article{hardt1997empirical, title = {{An Empirical Approach to VP Ellipsis}}, author = {Daniel Hardt}, journal = {Computational Linguistics}, year = {1997}, doi = {10.5555/972791.972797}, url = {https://doi.org/10.5555/972791.972797} } ``` - [← previous A Frame-Semantic Approach to Semantic Annotation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/lowe-1997-frame-semantic-approach-semantic-annotation/) - [next → Probabilistic Coreference in Information Extraction](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/kehler-1997-probabilistic-coreference-information-extraction/) - [↑ back to papers of 1997](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/1997/) ## References 32 references, 6 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Asher, Nicholas. 1993. Reference to Abstract Objects in English. Dordrecht. 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