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# Detection and Resolution of Verb Phrase Ellipsis

**Authors:** [Marjorie McShane](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/marjorie-mcshane/) and Petr Babkin · **Year:** 2016 · **Venue:** Linguistic Issues in Language Technology (LiLT), Volume 13, Issue 1 **Link:** [aclanthology.org/2016.lilt-13.1](https://aclanthology.org/2016.lilt-13.1/) · **Licence:** copyrighted (CSLI Publications) — summary only

[**16** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2566267116) openalex · 2026-10-18[**11** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/aclbulk-2016-mcshane-detection-resolution-verb-phrase-ellipsis/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Linguistic Issues in Language Technology](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2016.lilt-13/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2016.lilt-13.1/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2016.lilt-13.1.pdf)
- [DOI 10.33011/lilt.v13i.1385](https://doi.org/10.33011/lilt.v13i.1385)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2566267116)

**Authors (2)**

1. [Marjorie McShane](https://openalex.org/A5087176374) h 18 · 950 citations · 126 works
2. [Petr Babkin](https://openalex.org/A5010619241) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0009-0004-2737-9820) · h 6 · 254 citations · 20 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex (2026-10-18); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The paper describes ViPER, a rule-based system that detects and resolves VP ellipsis. It uses syntactic parallelism, modality correlations and the split between core and peripheral sentence constituents. Its key claim is that some cases are easy enough to resolve with high confidence before full semantic understanding exists. It was run on Gigaword. Of 26,988 candidate sentences, 18,027 remained after pruning false positives such as homonyms, parentheticals and idioms. Annotators judged 393 treatable examples: 239 (61%) were fully correct, 75 (19%) partly correct and 80 (20%) incorrect. For 320 of the 393 (81%), all three annotators chose the same resolution. The best single strategy, a parallel-modal rule without trimming, was correct on 45 of 55 examples (82%).

## Ideas

- I1. `en/src/expert.rs`: encode the three ViPER conditions as separate rules: parallel syntactic configuration, modal pairing and core-versus-peripheral constituents. Log the rule that fired in `en/src/explain.rs`, so every resolution gives its reason.
- I2. Coverage against precision: report, for each rule, how many cases it covers and how often it is correct on a held-out sample. Emit a resolution only from the rules with high precision, and state the coverage. The paper's split into correct, partial and incorrect outcomes is the right form for this table.
- I3. Gold by agreement: in `annot`, accept a sponsor as gold when all annotators agree (81% in the paper). Send the disagreements to review, and do not let them enter the gold set silently.

## For Mova

The code is `en/src/expert.rs`, `en/src/explain.rs` and `annot`. The chapters are [29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/29-ellipsis-word-order-information-structure/) and [24. Coordination and subordination](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/24-coordination-subordination/) (parallelism). The Gigaword source is licensed data, so use only the test material that the licence allows. Measure first: the correct, partial and incorrect split for the parallel-modal rule on a sample we may test on.

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.33011/lilt.v13i.1385](https://doi.org/10.33011/lilt.v13i.1385)

```
@inproceedings{mcshane2016detection,
  title = {{Detection and Resolution of Verb Phrase Ellipsis}},
  author = {McShane, Marjorie and Babkin, Petr},
  booktitle = {Linguistic Issues in Language Technology},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.33011/lilt.v13i.1385},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.33011/lilt.v13i.1385}
}
```

- [← previous Exploring the steps of Verb Phrase Ellipsis](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/aclbulk-2016-liu-exploring-steps-verb-phrase-ellipsis/)
- [next → A Corpus of Preposition Supersenses](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/aclbulk-2016-schneider-corpus-preposition-supersenses/)
- [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/)

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