--- title: "Verb Phrase Ellipsis detection using Automatically Parsed Text — Nielsen 2004" description: "Nielsen builds a detector for VP ellipsis, the first stage of a full resolver. 72% F1. 25 references, cited by 12 papers here." authors: ["Leif Arda Nielsen"] year: 2004 venue: "COLING 2004: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics" source: "https://aclanthology.org/C04-1157/" doi: "10.3115/1220355.1220512" 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-verb-phrase-ellipsis-detection-automatically/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/nielsen-2004-verb-phrase-ellipsis-detection-automatically/) [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/) / Verb Phrase Ellipsis detection using Automatically Parsed Text # Verb Phrase Ellipsis detection using Automatically Parsed Text **Authors:** [Leif Arda Nielsen](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/leif-arda-nielsen/) · **Year:** 2004 · **Venue:** COLING 2004: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics **Link:** [aclanthology.org/C04-1157](https://aclanthology.org/C04-1157/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) — summary only [**23** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2141184766) OpenAlex, 2026-10-14 · [**12** citations in our library](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/nielsen-2004-verb-phrase-ellipsis-detection-automatically/cited-by/) of the 140,884 papers whose bibliographies we read · [COLING 2004: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/C04-1/) · [licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) - [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/C04-1157/) - [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/C04-1157.pdf) - [DOI 10.3115/1220355.1220512](https://doi.org/10.3115/1220355.1220512) - [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2141184766) **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 Nielsen builds a detector for VP ellipsis, the first stage of a full resolver. It works on free text that has been parsed automatically. Three learners are compared: memory-based learning and two maximum-entropy models (GIS and L-BFGS). The detector reaches 72% F1 on a mixed corpus. Earlier work by Hardt reports 48% F1 for the same task. Using the Penn Treebank with empty-category information, the empty VP feature alone reaches 70% F1, and the full system 82%. Re-parsing the treebank gives 67%, and parsing parts of the BNC gives 71%. Combining the two gives 71–72%. The empty VP feature is the most informative one, and the drop from gold to parsed input is the main loss. ## For Mova - I1. `en/src/expert.rs`: a rule detector for the trigger. An auxiliary or modal with no verbal complement (no xcomp, ccomp or conjoined verb in the UD tree) is a candidate VPE site. Measure precision and recall on any VPE-annotated set whose licence allows testing. - I2. Learned detector with the same features: a per-token binary classifier on `en` features (aux token, tag, next punctuation, sentence position), trained on the training part and scored with `en folds`. Report F1 by feature group, so that each group can be judged alone. - I3. Gold against parsed input: report detection F1 on gold trees and on `en` trees for the same sentences. The gap between the two is the figure that tells the operator how much parser error costs the detector. The code is `en/src/expert.rs` and `en/src/ptag.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 BNC is NC, so any BNC material is for measurement only. Measure first: the rule detector against the gold-tree and parsed-tree gap on a test set we are allowed to use. ## 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. Verb Phrase Ellipsis detection using Automatically Parsed Text. COLING 2004: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.3115/1220355.1220512](https://doi.org/10.3115/1220355.1220512) ```bibtex @inproceedings{nielsen2004verb, title = {{Verb Phrase Ellipsis detection using Automatically Parsed Text}}, author = {Leif Arda Nielsen}, booktitle = {COLING 2004: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics}, year = {2004}, doi = {10.3115/1220355.1220512}, url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1220355.1220512} } ``` - [← previous Acquiring the Meaning of Discourse Markers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/hutchinson-2004-acquiring-meaning-discourse-markers/) - [next → Open Text Semantic Parsing Using FrameNet and WordNet](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/shi-2004-open-text-semantic-parsing-framenet/) - [↑ back to papers of 2004](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2004/) ## References 25 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. 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