How to pick out token instances of English verb-particle constructions

Abstract

We propose a method for automatically identifying individual instances of English verb-particle constructions (VPCs) in raw text. Our method employs the RASP parser and analysis of the sentential context of each VPC candidate to differentiate VPCs from simple combinations of a verb and prepositional phrase. We show that our proposed method has an F-score of 0.974 at VPC identification over the Brown Corpus and Wall Street Journal. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009.