--- title: "Generation of VP Ellipsis: A Corpus-Based Approach — Hardt 2001" description: "The paper asks when a generator should elide a verb phrase and leave an auxiliary in its place, as in \"in 1987… 10 references, cited by 2 papers here." authors: ["Daniel Hardt", "Owen Rambow"] year: 2001 venue: "Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics" source: "https://aclanthology.org/P01-1038/" doi: "10.3115/1073012.1073050" 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-2001-generation-vp-ellipsis-corpus-based/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/hardt-2001-generation-vp-ellipsis-corpus-based/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2001](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2001/) / Generation of VP Ellipsis: A Corpus-Based Approach # Generation of VP Ellipsis: A Corpus-Based Approach **Authors:** [Daniel Hardt](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/daniel-hardt/) and [Owen Rambow](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/owen-rambow/) · **Year:** 2001 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics **Link:** [aclanthology.org/P01-1038](https://aclanthology.org/P01-1038/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) — summary only [**10** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2139912122) OpenAlex, 2026-10-14 · **2** citations in our library of the 140,884 papers whose bibliographies we read · [Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/P01-1/) · [licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) - [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/P01-1038/) - [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/P01-1038.pdf) - [DOI 10.3115/1073012.1073050](https://doi.org/10.3115/1073012.1073050) - [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2139912122) **Authors (2)** 1. [Daniel Hardt](https://openalex.org/A5054824570) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6041-1475) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/144610213) · h 19 · 1,595 citations · 98 works 2. [Owen Rambow](https://openalex.org/A5021314411) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2054-039X) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1702447) · h 45 · 8,876 citations · 420 works Citations and author metrics: OpenAlex, 2026-10-14; authors with the same name are not always told apart. ## What it is about The paper asks when a generator should elide a verb phrase and leave an auxiliary in its place, as in "in 1987, only 9% did". The corpus is taken from Sections 5 and 6 of the Wall Street Journal part of the Penn Treebank: 126 examples in all, 111 negative cases where two identical verb phrases were not elided, and 15 positive cases. The authors code distance in words and sentences, the syntactic relation, voice, adjuncts, quotes and discourse structure. Distance and syntactic relation correlate with ellipsis, the length of the antecedent does not. A rule learner (Ripper) gives the lowest error when it runs after the realizer on surface features: a mean error rate of 7.5% in ten-fold cross-validation, against 11.9% for never eliding. ## For Mova - I1. `en/src/lin.rs`: after word order is fixed, add a rule that marks a verb pair for ellipsis only under the conditions the paper learns: same sentence, comparative construction, or at most 14 words apart with an antecedent of at least 3 words. Measure precision and recall on identical verb pairs from EWT, on the two-fold check (`en folds`). - I2. Build a VPE set from EWT, which is CC BY-SA and may be used for training. Screen pairs of identical verbs with fewer than 10 intervening verbs, as the paper does, and label them by hand or with `annot`, checking a sample by hand. Report how many pairs are elided. - I3. Stage test: run the elision decision at three points (on semantic features only, after parsing, after linearization) and compare error rates in `en lin-eval`. The paper finds the error falls from 11.7% to 9.2% to 7.5% as the stage moves later. - I4. Use the 126 Penn Treebank examples as a test set only, never as training data for Mova. 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/), and the code is `en/src/lin.rs` with the document context in `en/src/ctx.rs` for the antecedent distance. Measure first how often identical verb pairs within 10 verbs are elided in EWT. The paper's data is WSJ text from the LDC-licensed Penn Treebank, so it is test only in any measurement. Its 126 examples are a small set, and its error rate is cross-validated, not held out. ## Institutions [🏢**AT&T** Bedminster · United States 19 works · 12,873 citations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/companies/at-t/) · [🎓**Copenhagen Business School** Copenhagen · Denmark 3 works · 48 citations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/copenhagen-business-school/) ## Cite Cite as Daniel Hardt and Owen Rambow. 2001. Generation of VP Ellipsis: A Corpus-Based Approach. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.3115/1073012.1073050](https://doi.org/10.3115/1073012.1073050) ```bibtex @inproceedings{hardt2001generation, title = {{Generation of VP Ellipsis: A Corpus-Based Approach}}, author = {Daniel Hardt and Owen Rambow}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics}, year = {2001}, doi = {10.3115/1073012.1073050}, url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1073012.1073050} } ``` - [← previous Identifying anaphoric repetitions and automatically interpreting pronominal expressions in French texts](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/trouilleux-2001-identification-reprises-interpretation-automatique/) — (Identification des reprises et interprétation automatique des expressions pronominales dans des textes en français) - [next → Fast Context-Free Grammar Parsing Requires Fast Boolean Matrix Multiplication](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/lee-2001-fast-context-free-grammar-parsing/) - [↑ back to papers of 2001](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2001/) ## References 10 references, 2 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Jean Carletta. 1996. Assessing agreement on classification tasks: The kappa statistic. Computational Linguistics, 22(2):249–254. [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/carletta-1996-assessing-agreement-classification-tasks-kappa/) 2. William Cohen. 1996. Learning trees and rules with set-valued features. In Fourteenth Conference of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence. AAAI. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=William+Cohen%2E+1996%2E+Learning+trees+and+rules+with+set%2Dvalued+features%2E+In+Fourteenth+Conference+of+the+American+Association+of+Artificial+Intelligence%2E+AAAI%2E) 3. Mary Dalrymple, Stuart Shieber, and Fernando Pereira. 1991. Ellipsis and higher-order unification. Linguistics and Philosophy, 14(4), August. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Mary+Dalrymple%2C+Stuart+Shieber%2C+and+Fernando+Pereira%2E+1991%2E+Ellipsis+and+higher%2Dorder+unification%2E+Linguistics+and+Philosophy%2C+14%284%29%2C+August%2E) 4. Robert Fiengo and Robert May. 1994. Indices and Identity. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Robert+Fiengo+and+Robert+May%2E+1994%2E+Indices+and+Identity%2E+MIT+Press%2C+Cambridge%2C+MA%2E) 5. Daniel Hardt. 1997. An empirical approach to vp ellipsis. Computational Linguistics, 23(4):525–541. [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/hardt-1997-empirical-approach-vp-ellipsis/) 6. Daniel Hardt. 1999. Dynamic interpretation of verb phrase ellipsis. Linguistics and Philosophy, 22(2):187–221. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Daniel+Hardt%2E+1999%2E+Dynamic+interpretation+of+verb+phrase+ellipsis%2E+Linguistics+and+Philosophy%2C+22%282%29%3A187%E2%80%93221%2E) 7. Andrew Kehler. 1993. The effect of establishing coherence in ellipsis and anaphora resolution. In Proceedings, 28th Annual Meeting of the ACL, Columbus, OH. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Andrew+Kehler%2E+1993%2E+The+effect+of+establishing+coherence+in+ellipsis+and+anaphora+resolution%2E+In+Proceedings%2C+28th+Annual+Meeting+of+the+ACL%2C+Columbus%2C+OH%2E) 8. Owen Rambow and Tanya Korelsky. 1992. Applied text generation. In Third Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing, pages 40–47, Trento, Italy. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Owen+Rambow+and+Tanya+Korelsky%2E+1992%2E+Applied+text+generation%2E+In+Third+Conference+on+Applied+Natural+Language+Processing%2C+pages+40%E2%80%9347%2C+Trento%2C+Italy%2E) 9. Ivan A. Sag. 1976. Deletion and Logical Form. Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (Published 1980 by Garland Publishing, New York). [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Ivan+A%2E+Sag%2E+1976%2E+Deletion+and+Logical+Form%2E+Ph%2ED%2E+thesis%2C+Massachusetts+Institute+of+Technology%2E+%28Published+1980+by+Garland+Publishing%2C+New+York%29%2E) 10. Marilyn A. Walker. 1996. Limited attention and discourse structure. Computational Linguistics, 22-2:255–264. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Marilyn+A%2E+Walker%2E+1996%2E+Limited+attention+and+discourse+structure%2E+Computational+Linguistics%2C+22%2D2%3A255%E2%80%93264%2E)