--- title: "Robust VPE Detection using Automatically Parsed Text — Nielsen 2004" description: "This short student paper is the robust version of Nielsen's detector. 70% F1. 23 references, cited by 4 papers here." authors: ["Leif Arda Nielsen"] year: 2004 venue: "Proceedings of the ACL Student Research Workshop" source: "https://aclanthology.org/P04-2009/" doi: "10.3115/1219079.1219084" 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/nielsen-2004-robust-vpe-detection-automatically-parsed/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/nielsen-2004-robust-vpe-detection-automatically-parsed/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2004](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2004/) / Robust VPE Detection using Automatically Parsed Text # Robust VPE Detection using Automatically Parsed Text **Authors:** [Leif Arda Nielsen](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/leif-arda-nielsen/) · **Year:** 2004 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the ACL Student Research Workshop **Link:** [aclanthology.org/P04-2009](https://aclanthology.org/P04-2009/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) — summary only [**4** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2113749564) OpenAlex, 2026-10-14 · [**4** citations in our library](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/nielsen-2004-robust-vpe-detection-automatically-parsed/cited-by/) of the 140,884 papers whose bibliographies we read · [Proceedings of the ACL Student Research Workshop](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/P04-2/) · [licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) - [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/P04-2009/) - [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/P04-2009.pdf) - [DOI 10.3115/1219079.1219084](https://doi.org/10.3115/1219079.1219084) - [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2113749564) **Authors (1)** 1. [Nielsen, Leif Arda](https://openalex.org/A5077271519) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/32413194) · h 4 · 54 citations · 7 works Citations and author metrics: OpenAlex, 2026-10-14; authors with the same name are not always told apart. ## What it is about This short student paper is the robust version of Nielsen's detector. It uses machine learning on free text that has been parsed automatically, with no hand-written parses. On a mixed corpus the detector reaches 70% F1. Two parsers are compared. The Charniak parser gives full structure, and RASP gives full parses for 70% of sentences, partial parses for 28%, and tags only for 2%. Re-parsing the Penn Treebank gives 63% F1, rising to 68% with extra features. The BNC, which has tags but no parses, gives 76% F1 with lexical forms and tags alone. A parse-based feature, the auxiliary-final VP, works well with Charniak's structures but only half as well with RASP's. The empty-VP feature keeps a precision above 80%, but its recall drops to about 20% on parser output. ## For Mova - I1. `en parse-eval`: report detection F1 separately for sentences with a full parse, a partial parse and no parse, as the RASP split in the paper suggests. This shows where the pipeline loses sentences, on EWT test. - I2. Feature reliability per parser: for each parse-based feature in `en`, measure its precision and recall on gold trees and on `en` trees. The feature that loses most on parser output is the first to be made more robust. - I3. Empty-VP analogue: Mova has no empty nodes, so use the rule that a modal with no following verb marks a VPE site. Its precision and recall should be reported in the same way as the paper's empty-VP feature, so that the drop on parser output can be seen. The code is `en/src/expert.rs` and the `en parse-eval` command. 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 BNC is NC, so the BNC part is test-only, and the paper's parsers are not Mova parsers. Measure first on EWT test, with the full, partial and no-parse split. ## Institutions [🎓**King's College London** London · United Kingdom 13 works · 894 citations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/king-s-college-london/) ## Cite Cite as Leif Arda Nielsen. 2004. Robust VPE Detection using Automatically Parsed Text. Proceedings of the ACL Student Research Workshop. The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.3115/1219079.1219084](https://doi.org/10.3115/1219079.1219084) ```bibtex @inproceedings{nielsen2004robust, title = {{Robust VPE Detection using Automatically Parsed Text}}, author = {Leif Arda Nielsen}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACL Student Research Workshop}, year = {2004}, doi = {10.3115/1219079.1219084}, url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1219079.1219084} } ``` - [← previous From information structure, topic and focus, to theme in Biblical Hebrew](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/floor-2004-information-structure-topic-focus-theme/) - [next → An Algorithm for Resolving Individual and Abstract Anaphora in Danish Texts and Dialogues](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/navarretta-2004-algorithm-resolving-individual-abstract-anaphora/) - [↑ back to papers of 2004](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2004/) ## References 23 references, 7 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Eric Brill. 1995. Transformation-based error-driven learning and natural language processing: A case study in part-of-speech tagging. Computational Linguistics, 21(4):543–565. [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/brill-1995-transformation-based-error-driven-learning/) 2. E. Briscoe and J. Carroll. 2002. Robust accurate statistical annotation of general text. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/briscoe-2002-robust-accurate-statistical-annotation-general/) 3. Eugene Charniak. 2000. A maximum-entropy-inspired parser. In Meeting of the North American Chapter of the ACL, page 132. [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/charniak-2000-maximum-entropy-inspired-parser/) 4. Walter Daelemans, Jakub Zavrel, Ko van der Sloot, and Antal van den Bosch. 2002. Tilburg memory based learner, version 4.3, reference guide. 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